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PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 






PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 

A 

SERIES OF ADDRESSES, ESSAYS AND SERMONS 

DESIGNED TO SET FORTH GREAT TRUTHS 

IN POPULAR FORM 






BY 

AUGUSTUS HOPKINS STRONG, D. D., LL.D. 

PRESIDENT AND PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY IN THE ROCHESTER 
THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY; AUTHOR OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, 
IN THREE VOLUMES ; OUTLINES OF SYSTEMATIC THEO- 
LOGY ; THE GREAT POETS AND THEIR THEOLOGY ; 
CHRIST IN CREATION AND ETHICAL MONISM J 
MISCELLANIES, IN TWO VOLUMES. 



SECOND EDITION 



PHILADELPHIA 

GRIFFITH AND ROWLAND PRESS 

1701 Chestnut Street 

1912 






nisi 



COPYRIGHT 

BY THE AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY 
1912 



LC Co 



ntrol 



Uumt> er 




027668 



CCLA312768 



TO 

JOHN D. EOCKEFELLEE, 

THE FRIEND AND HELPER OF MANY A GOOD CAUSE, 
THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED. 






" Wo ZWEI Hypothesen gleicii moglich sind, die eink 

UBEREINSTIMMEND MIT MORALISCHEN BeDUEFNISSEN, DIE 

andere mit ihnen streitend, kann nichts die waul zu 
gunsten der letzern lenken." 

Lotze, Medicin. Psych., 3(5. 

BAeTTETe fii] rig- ty/ar karat, 6 avAaywyuv Sid ttjz (pi?j)Gn(p'ia^ ml kevtj? 
a-rcarr]? Kara rr/v wapdSoaiv ruv avdpuircjv, Kara ra croix^a rov Koa/xov 
.nal oh Kara, Xpiarov brt ev avrib KaroiKEl irdv rb nXr/pupa rfj- Qedrrjrog- 
O(0[iariKG)g y Kal tore ev avru> wEnXrjpiop-EVOi, b<r kariv ?'/ KEtyaArj 7rda?j- 

Paul, Coloss., 2: 8-10. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 



Tins book is printed by way of testimony. It is a confession 
of faith — a long one indeed, yet none the less sincere. The au- 
thor can say: "I believed. — therefore have I spoken." In this 
day when skepticism is so rife, and when oven Christian teach- 
ers so frequently pride themselves that they believe, not so 
much, but so little, it seems to him that nothing is more needed 
than uncompromising assertion of faith in the existence of 
God, the world, and the soul. "When the Son of man cometh, 
shall he find faith on the earth?" For himself, and for more 
than seven thousand others who have not bowed the knee to the 
Baal of brute force and impersonal law, the author desires to 
answer in the affirmative. 

The volume takes its title from the first Essay,^and the title 
is fairly descriptive of the book. It aims to present truth in 
popular form; most of the Essays contained in it have been 
written for public address; some of them date back to a time 
when the author's rhetoric was more exuberant than now, — 
for all this he makes no apology. He would fain hope that 
what Fox said of Burke's exuberance of fancy may be 
counted true of himself: "Reduce his language, withdraw his 
images. — and you will find that he is more wise than eloquent: 
you will have your full weight of metal, though you melt 
down the chasing." Yet, if any reader still demand abstract 
statement instead of the oratorical method, the author takes 
the liberty of referring him to the "Systematic Theology" of 
which this is the companion-volume, where he will find much 
of the same truth put in more philosophical form. 

It needs to be stated, however, that much of the present 
book is new, or at least has never before appeared in print. 
The Essavs on "Modern Idealism" and on "The Xew Theologv" 



Till PREFACE. 

on "Dante and the Divine Comedy," and on "Poetry and Rob- 
ert Browning/' have been written for this volume. The au- 
thor has included in it certain tributes to the memory of the 
dead, not only because the departed were his friends, but 
because in speaking of them he could also express his views 
of the work they sought to do. The personal element is not 
wholly lacking, — in many cases its elimination would have 
required the entire reconstruction of the discourse, — in general, 
the author would have the several addresses judged in the 
light of the special occasions for which they were prepared. 
The author would disclaim any expectation that his book 
will be widely read. It is not published at the request of 
friends, — indeed, the author is not aware that any friends de- 
sire to read what he has written. His chief aim has been to 
put himself on record. If any choose to read, well, — here is 
opportunity for the curious investigator to say: ''Sic cogi- 
iavit." But if none choose to read, it is also well, — the au- 
thor, at least, has delivered his soul. He commits his work to 
God and to his providence — sowing his seed and withholding 
not his hand, though he knows not which shall prosper, wheth- 
er this or that. He prays that his errors, if he has erred, may 
be uprooted and exposed; and that any truth he has discovered 
or uttered may somewhere, and at some time, be made fruitful 
for good. But, whatever may befall him or his work, Chbisto 
Deo Gloeia, Salvatobi Omnipote-nti! 
Rochester, Apbil 1, 1SS8. 

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 



This book, which has long been out of print, is now, at the 
request of many friends, reproduced in a different and cheaper 
form. Although it represents the earlier thinking of the au- 
thor, and although his views have in some respects been changed 
by further study, the book in his judgment is still true in all 
essentials, and may still serve the cause of truth. It is there- 
fore given to the press unaltered, except in the matter of typo- 
graphical form, and with the hope that it may now find a new 
set of readers. 

Rochester. Aprie 1. 1912. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



I. 

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION, 

An Address before the Alumni of the Rochester Theological Sem- 
inary, at their annual meeting, May 20th, 1868, and printed in 
the Baptist Quarterly, 2 : 393 sq., 1- 

II. 
SCIENCE AND RELIGION, 
An Address delivered at the Commencement of the Medical Col- 
lege, Cleveland, Ohio, February 18, 18G7 19 



III. 

MATERIALISTIC SKEPTICISM, 

An Essay printed in the Examiner, New York, October 2, 1873,.. 31-38 

IV. 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION, 
An Address delivered before the Literary Societies of Colby 

University, Waterville, Maine, Tuesday evening, July 23, 1S78, 39-57 

V - ^ 

MODERN IDEALISM, 

Printed in the Bibliotheca Sacra, January, 188S, 58-74 

VI. 

SCIENTIFIC THEISM, 

An Essay read before "The Club," Rochester, February 1G, 1875, 75-89 

VII. 
THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, 

OR, AN EARLIER VIEW OP THE WILL, 

Printed in the Baptist Review, 1880: 527-550, and 1881: 30-47, 90-113 

VIII. 
MODIFIED CALVINISM, 

OB, REMAINDERS OF FREEDOM IN MAN, 

Printed In the Baptist Review, April, 1883, 114-128 



X TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

IX. 

THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES, 

OS. MIHACLES AS ATTESTING A DIVIXE REVELATION, 

An Essay read before the Baptist Pastors' Conference of the State 
of New York, Binghamton, October 23, 1S78, and printed In 
the Baptist Review, April. 1S79, 129-147 

X. 
THE METHOD OF INSPIRATION, 
Printed In the Examiner, New York, October 7, and October 

14, 1SS0 148-135 

XL 
CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM, 
Preached at Yassar College, February 28. 18S6, as a Sermon on the 
text, John 21:21, 22 — "What shall this man do? .... 
What is that to thee? Follow thou me," 156-163 

XII. 

THE NEW THEOLOGY, 

Printed in the Baptist Quarterly Review, January, 18S8 161-179 

XIII. 
THE LIVING GOD, 
Originally prepared as a Sermon upon the text, Jer. 10 : 10 — 
"The Lord is the true God; he is the living God, and an ever- 
lasting King," 1S0-1S7 

XIV. 
THE HOLINESS OF GOD, 

Originally prepared as a Sermon upon the text. Ex. 13 : 11 — - 
"Glorious in holiness," and preached in the Chapel of the Uni- 
versity of Rochester, on the Day of Prayer for Colleges, Janu- 
ary 31, 1878; subsequently printed as an article in the Exam- 
iner, January 26, February 9, and February 22, 1SS2 1S8-200 

XV. 

THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 
Preached in Sage Chapel. Cornell University, May 25, 1884, as a 
Sermon on the text. Matt. 22:42 — "What think ye of the 
Christ ? Whose son is he ? " 201-212 

XVI. 
THE NECESSITY OF THE ATONEMENT, 
A Sermon upon the text. Luke 24:26 — "Behoved it not the 

Christ to suffer these things? " 213-219 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. xi 

XVII. 

THE BELIEVER'S UNION WITH CHRIST, 

Printed in the Examiner, June 12, 1S79 220-225 

XVIII. 
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS, 
Originally prepared as a Sermon upon the text Matt. 3: 15 — 
"Thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness," and preached 
before the Cincinnati Baptist Union ; printed in the Examiner, 
February 12, and February 19, 18S0 226-237 

XIX. 

CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND ITS KEEPERS, 
An Address delivered before the American Baptist Publication 

Society, at its annual meeting in New York City, May, 1868,.. 238-244 

XX. 

UNCONSCIOUS ASSUMPTIONS OF COMMUNION POLEMICS, 
Printed in the Examiner, January 21, 1875 245-249 

XXI. 

THE TEACHER'S GUIDE AND HELPER, 
A Sermon preached before the Sunday School Convention, Boston, 
May 20, 1S77, on the text, 2 Cor. 3: 6 — "Able ministers of the 
New Testament, not of the letter, but of the Spirit," 250-258 

XXII. 

COUNCILS OF ORDINATION: THEIR POWERS AND DUTIES, 

Printed in the Examiner, January 2, and January 9, 1879 259-268 

XXIII. 
THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 

ON YOUNG MEN IN COUKSES OP PREPARATORY STUDY, 

An Address written for the Anniversary of Peddie Institute, 

Hightstown, N. J., June 17, 1875, 269-280 

XXIV. 

SOURCES OF SUPPLY FOR THE MINISTRY, 
An Address before the Rhode Island Baptist Social Union, Provi- 
dence, May, 1877 ; printed in the Watchman, Boston, October, 
1878, 281-288 



xll TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

XXV. 
THE LACK OF STUDENTS FOR THE MINISTRY, 
An Address delivered at the annual meeting of the New York 

Baptist State Convention, Buffalo, October 25, 1883 289-29:! 



XXVI. 
EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: ITS PRINCIPLES AND ITS 

NECESSITY, 
Aii Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Monroe Bap- 
tist Association, West Henrietta, N. Y., October 2, 1872 294-301 

XXVII. 
EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: ITS IDEA AND ITS REQUISITES, 
An Address delivered at the Dedication of Rockefeller Hall, Roch- 
ester Theological Seminary, May 19, 1880 302-31.°. 

XXVIII. 
TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP, 
An Address delivered at the Dedication of the Theological Hall, 

Hamilton Theological Seminary, Hamilton, N. Y., June 16, 1886, 314-318 

XXIX. 

ARE OUR COLLEGES CHRISTIAN? 

Printed in the Examiner, New York, July 19, 1S83 319-323 

XXX. 

NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION, 
A Charge to the Candidate, at the Ordination of Mr. Ernest D. 
Burton, Acting Professor-elect in Newton Theological Insti- 
tution, Rochester, June 22, 1SS3, 324-329 



XXXI. 

A GREAT TEACHER OF GREEK EXEGESIS, 
An Address at the Funeral of Professor Horatio B. Hackett, 
D. D., in the Second Baptist Church, Rochester, November 5, 
1875 330-336 

XXXII. 
CHURCH HISTORY, AND ONE WHO TAUGHT IT, 
An Address at the Funeral of Professor R. J. W. Buckland, D. D., 

in the Second Baptist Church, Rochester, February 1, 1877,.. 337-343 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. xili 

XXXIII. 
LEARNING IN THE PROFESSOR'S CHAIR, 
Remarks at the Funeral of the Rev. V. R. Hotchkiss, D. D., in 

the First Baptist Church, Rochester, January 7, 1882 344-346 

XXXIV. 
THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT, 
A Sermon on the death of President Garfield, preached at the Cen- 
tral Presbyterian Church, Rochester, Sunday morning September 
25, 1881, on the text, 2 Samuel 2: 23 — "And it came to pass 
that as many as came to the place where Asahel fell down and 
died, stood still," 347-357 

XXXV. 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING, 
A Sermon before the Judson Society of Missionary Inquiry, Brown 

University, Providence, R. I., August 31, 1869, 358-367 

XXXVI. 
LEAVING THE NINETY AND NINE, 
A Sermon before the American Baptist Missionary Union, at its 
annual meeting, Indianapolis, May 22, 1881, on the text, Matt. 
18 : 12 — " Doth he not leave the ninety and nine? " 368-377 

XXXVII. 
THE ECONOMICS OF MISSIONS, 
An Address before the Baptist Congress, Brooklyn, November 

14, 1882 : 378-386 

XXXVIII. 
THE THEOLOGY OF MISSIONS, 
An Address of Welcome, at the meeting of the Inter-Seminary 

Missionary Alliance, Rochester, October, 1885 387-390 

XXXIX. 

THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE CHERUBIM, 

A Sermon upon the text, Genesis 3: 24 — "So he drove out the 

man, and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, 

and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of 

the tree of life," 391-399 

XL. 
WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK, 
A Sermon preached in the First Baptist Church, Rochester, July 
21, 1S78, on the text, Genesis 2: 18 — "And the Lord God said: 
It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an 
help meet for him," 400—409 



xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

XLI. 
WOMAN'S WORK IN MISSIONS, 
An Address before the Annual Convention of the American 
Women's Baptist Missionary Society, delivered in the First 
Baptist Church, Rochester, April 18, 18S3, 410-417 

XLII. 
THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN, 
An Address delivered at the Annual Commencement of the Granger 
Place School, Canandaigua, N. Y., Tuesday morning, June 20, 
1S82 418-430 

XLIII. 
RE-MARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE, 

THE LAW OF THE STATE AND THE LAW OF SCEIPTUKB. 

Printed in the Examiner, February 17, and February 24, 1881... 431-442 

XLIV. 
CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY, 
A Lecture before the Pennsylvania Ministers' Institute, Chester, 

Pa., June, 1871 443-460 

XLV. 
GETTING AND SPENDING, 
An Address at the "Ladies' Meeting" of the Baptist Social 

Union, Delmonico's, New York, November 1, 1883, 461-467 

XLVI. 
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST, 
A Lecture before the Robinson Rhetorical Society of the Roch- 
ester Theological Seminary, February 25, 1878 46S-483 

XLVII. 

THE CRUSADES, 

An Essay read before "The Club," Rochester, February 15, 1S76, 484-500 

XLVIII. 
DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY, 
A Lecture delivered at Vassar College, February 21 and 22, 

1888; printed in the Standard, Chicago, November, 18S7 501-524 

XLIX. 
POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 
A Lecture delivered at Wellesley College, May, 1SS6; printed In 

tue Examiner, December, 18S7, 525-543 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. XI 

L. 

ADDRESSES TO SUCCESSIVE GRADUATING CLASSES 

OF THE ROCHESTER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, 

1S73: "The Three Onlies," 544-546 

1874 : Truth and Love 546-548 

1875 : Manhood in the Ministry 548-551 

1S76 : Work and Power 552-554 

1877 : Courage, Passive and Active, 554-557 

1878 : True Dogmatism, 557-560 

1879 : God's Leadings, 560-562 

1880 : Self-Mastery 562-566 

1881 : Mental Qualities Requisite to the Pastor 566-569 

1882 : Adaptation, 569-572 

1883 : Faith the Measure of Success 572-575 

1884 : Habits in the Ministry 575-577 

1885 : The Preacher's Doubts 578-580 

1886 : High-Mindedness, 580-583 

18S7 : Zeal for Christ 583-586 






I. 

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION/ 



On the last page of "Tom Brown at Rugby" there is a vivid and soulful 
picture of Tom's return, years afler his school-days are ended, to the scene 
of his early scrapes and triumphs. He enters the chapel and once more takes 
his seat on the lowest bench, in the very place he occupied as a little boy on 
li is first Sunday at Rugby. On the oaken paneling he sees scratched the 
name of the youngster who sat that day by his side. Upon the great painted 
window the same shadows of the trees seem dancing that drew his thoughts 
from service and sermon long ago. The chapel is empty now. No rows of 
boys fill the benches. The solid English face that burned with such inten- 
sity of love for truth and such noble scorn of moral cowardice looks down 
no longer from the pulpit. "The Doctor," the great Arnold, sleeps now 
under the stone pavement of the chapel -floor. As Tom Brown meditates, 
there seem to rise before him the forms of the living and the dead whom 
he once met there — many of them braver and purer than he, yet scarcely 
known till now. Now, for the first time, he comprehends his debt to them 
and to him whose commanding spirit bound them all together. The lofty 
teachings of that sacred place assume an aspect of ideal grandeur that awes, 
inspires and rebukes him. Humbled in spirit, and melted to grateful tears, 
he kneels before the altar, at the grave of Arnold, and renews his vows of 
consecration to that greater Master to whom Arnold led him. 

The day of our return to these haunts of our early learning, brethren of 
the Alumni, is in like manner a day of mingled sorrow and joy. There is 
a reverent regard for those at whose feet we sat which makes these scenes 
sacred to us, though in the presence of the living it finds only a faint 
expression in words. There is thankfulness of spirit, as we gather from 
different parts of the great harvest-field and rejoice together over the bless- 
ing that has followed our labors. Though the sheaves we bring are not so 
many nor so large as we had hoped, and "old Adam has proved too strong 
for young Melancthon," yet there is a confidence within us, which we never 
could have had without these years of experience, that old Adam is not too 
strong for Christ. Before us too there rise the faces of some whose work 
is all complete and whose souls have entered into rest. A little musing, a 
little forgetfulness of the sights and sounds around us, and 

"The forms of the departed 
Enter at the open door; 
The beloved, the true hearted, 
Come to visit us once more. 



* An Address before the Alumni of the Rochester Theological Seminary, at 
their annual meeting, May 20th, 1868, and printed in the Baptist Quarterly, 
2 : 393 sq. 



2 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 

They, the young and strung, who cherished 

Noble longings for the strife, — 
By t he roadside fell and perished, 

Weary of the march of life." 

In the presence of these memories we are subdued and yet exalted. Our 
noblest resolves are strengthened by the thought that "s«ch as these have 
lived and died." But a more than mortal presence is here also. Christ is 
here — the same Christ into whose hands we gave our lives as we went out 
iuto the world's great strife. His truth remains — the same truth of which 
we gained glimpses during those early years of preparation, but which now 
fills a larger arc of our vision. It would seem that the only fitting employ- 
ment for such an hour as this must be the consideration of some one of 
those great relations which affect our success as ministers of Christ, and 
which have to do with the defense and propagation of the faith. I am 
sure that no preacher who has received his training here will deem me 
unpractical when I propose as the theme of the evening : Philosophy and 
Religion. I ask your attention to three separate divisions of my subject : 
first, the debt of religion to philosophy; secondly, the dangers of philosophy 
the dangers of religion also; and thirdly, an impartial philosophy essential 
to the perfect triumph of religion. 

Religion may be viewed in two aspects, according as we look upon its 
speculative or its practical side. It may exist in the mind of a child, in the 
shape of reverence, love, and trust towards God, long before the child has 
given any conscious account to itself of its faith. It may exist, on the other 
hand, in the mind of the scientific theologian, in the shape of a thoroughly 
digested doctrinal system, though the system may not yet have melted the 
heart and run the activities of the life into its moulds. Let it never be 
forgotten, however, that either one of these sides of religion tends to com- 
plete itself by the production of the other. Like positive and negative 
electricity, the one attracts the other, and without the other cannot be made 
perfect. The child, for example, grows to maturity of years. Every step 
uf that growing maturity is marked by an increasing habit of introspection. 
The faith that once seemed intuitive assumes definite form and order to 
the reason. The truths once held by the intellect in a state of solution are 
precipitated and crystallized about some centre. As the nebular hypothesis 
supposes a revolving fire-mist diffused throughout the universe, which con- 
denses as it whirls, until the worlds are thrown off with their harmonious 
movements and their perfect beauty, so the child's faith, once vague and 
unreasoning, cannot exist forever in the form of nebula, but turns and 
seethes and solidifies, until it comes to be a little solar system for interde- 
pendence and order. And, in like manner, the student of scientific theology 
must shut his ears continually to the voices that fill the air of that lofty 
region of thought, if he would prevent the religion of the intellect from 
becoming a religion of the heart. Both Chalmers and De Wette were men 
with whom the scientific interest became at last a practical interest, and who 
found theology a school-master to lead them to Christ. 

Now religion, as a scientific system, rests upon a basis of philosophy. 
The inevitable tendency of the mind to form to itself a definite and con- 
nected scheme of knowledge impels it, not ouly to bring its religious beliefs 
into connection and order, but to search for the foundations of those beliefs. 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 8 

It cannot content itself with theology proper. Besides giving to the truths 
of revelation a scientific form, it desires to know what are the proofs of rev- 
elation, and what are the evidences that a God exists from whom a revela- 
tion might come. There can be no peace to the logical understanding until 
these questions are answered; but the answer to them is impossible without 
philosophy. For, this is the difference between theology and philosophy : 
Theology begins with the revelation of God and the consciousness of God, 
and from these, by a synthetic method, constructs her system. Philosophy, 
on the other hand, begins with those underlying facts of mind and matter 
from which we argue the existence of a God, and the authority of revelation. 
Pursuing an analytic method, it asks whether we have any real knowledge 
of these facts ; it seeks to give an accurate and complete account of these 
facts ; it aims to determine whether these facts warrant the erection upon 
them of so vast a superstructure. Any one who has traveled in Holland will 
remember those marvelous cities that have risen from the beds of ancient 
marshes, supported upon myriads of piles driven into the yielding soil. 
Many a church is towerless there, because the foundation cannot be trusted 
to bear a greater weight. Many a wall on private streets is cracked from top 
to bottom by the settling of the piles beneath it. Many a grain-merchant, 
with tons of golden corn stored in his granary, passes his days and nights 
in fear, lest some unusual weight may reveal a weakness in the supports 
beneath. Let it be whispered that the foundations of the Town-Hall of 
Amsterdam are sinking, and there is no quieting the town until men of 
experience have examined those foundations, and found them sure. Now 
it is a most serious question whether religion, so far as it is a scientific 
system, is like one of those immense structures in the Netherlands that are 
built upon the sand, and may, some years from now, give way and tumble 
to the ground ; or whether, like St. Peter's at Rome, its foundations go down 
to the everlasting rock. And philosophy is the science of foundation. It 
busies itself with the examination of the grounds of faith. It seeks to 
determine whether religion has a safe basis and support in the facts of 
consciousness. 

There is still another service which philosophy renders to religion, namely, 
that of defining and correlating the great primary conceptions of revelation. 
The ideas of conscience, virtue, liberty, providence, God, are given to us 
by revelation in the concrete. Philosophy seeks either to analyze them or 
to show that they are incapable of analysis, and having ascertained their 
intrinsic significance, aims to set them in reconciliation with the remaining 
facts of our mental constitution, and with our observation of the world. So 
far as theology argues from the mental constitution of man, indeed, she 
must get her facts from philosophy. Her doctrine of the will, and her 
determination of the limits of the human faculties, her application of realism 
to the unity of the race, and her theory of the true end of being, must all be 
ultimately given her by the prior philosophy with which she sets out in her 
investigations. Both in her account .of the universe and in her account of 
God, theology is obliged to combine with the facts of revelation the facts 
of consciousness, since only through consciousness have we any personal 
knowledge of either. We stand between God and the world. We must 
interpret matter by mind, and God by mind, and that interpretation la 



V 



4 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 

impossible without a philosophy of mind. Upon the front of the temple 
of Apollo at Delphi, Plutarch declares that the two Greek letlers Epsilou 
Iota were inscribed. It was the word "Thou art!" — and this, John Howe, 
in his preface to the "Living Temple," interprets to bo an assertion of the 
eternal existence of the god. But upon that same temple-front, according 
to an old tradition, was another inscription, — this namely: "Know thy- 
self! " May it not be that the Puritan divine gave the Epilson Iota a wrong 
interpretation, and that both the inscriptions had one common object — to 
admonish him who entered the sacred fane that all knowledge of divinity 
must proceed from self-knowledge? "Thou art, O soul! Know then thy- 
self! Understand first thine own existence and attributes, so shalt thou 
best know the divine, of which thou art the image." So at the gate of the 
temple of Theology the inscription might well be placed: "Thou art! 
Know thyself! " for a true knowledge of mind is indispensable to a scien- 
tific exposition of religion. 

I do not forget, however, that something more than abstract reasoning is 
needed, to set forth convincingly the debt which religion owes to philosophy. 
Let me ask you for a moment to look at the matter in the light of history. 
Have you ever reflected upon the remarkable difference in form that exists 
between Augustine and Calvin, — between the massy ore of Augustine's the- 
ologizing and the stamped and minted coin of Calvin's Institutes? Both 
held the same great fundamental doctrines, but Calvin has put them into a 
scientific order and organized them into a comprehensive system which 
would have been utterly impossible in Augustine's day. No one can fail to 
see that between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries theology has made 
a great advance in arrangement, in compactness, in logical force, in practical 
power. And to what shall we attribute this advance? To nothing more or 
less than the influence of that Aristotle, whom Luther called "an accursed, 
mischief-making heathen." It was the study of Aristotle which first made 
theology a science, and rendered possible a Calvin. That mighty movement 
of the human mind which we call Scholasticism, with its noble attempts to 
define and prove every doctrine of religion on principles of reason, and its 
rich results for modern philosophical theology, was a child of Aristotle's 
logic. By it, the matter of theology, received from Augustine, and full there- 
fore of his Platonic realism and soaring contempt for matter, was worked 
up into new shape for the uses of the coming times. Thus both th« Platonic 
and Aristotelian philosophies, one at heart though different in method, have 
disciplined the forces of theology and made them available. And their influ- 
ence is felt the moment we compare Augustine, in whose works the truths of 
religion lie scattered about like raw recruits bivouacked for the night, with 
Calvin, who draws up those same truths like soldiers in line of battle, ready 
ou the instant for attack or defense. Men may decry philosophy, but it is 
only by ignoring what philosophy has wrought. Still those sceptred kings 
of abstract thought control the minds of living men, and rule us from their 
nrns. Take away the influence of Plato and Aristotle, and you put a scien- 
tific theology where John of Damascus found it eleven centuries ago. 

There is little time to mention the services of modern philosophical 
thinkers to religion. Who can overestimate the magnificent contribution to 
our knowledge of the ethical nature of God which Bishop Butler made, when 



: ) 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 5 

he propounded and demonstrated his celebrated doctrine of the supremacy 
of conscience in the moral constitution of man? What but the works of 
Coleridge, splendid even in their incompleteness, rescued the theological 
thinking of England from the slough of utilitarianism and materialism into 
which Locke and Paley had led it, and by setting it upon the rock of a true 
spiritual philosophy, gave it a foothold and vantage-ground from which to 
contend against the incoming flood of German pantheism? The mere men 
tion of these facts is sufficient to show that there is no possibility of under 
standing the history of theology without a previous study of philosophy. , 
Nor is the elTect of philosophy confined simply to the modification of systems I 
of abstract theology. Whatever affects theology comes ultimately to affect iS 
the practical experience and working of Christianity. Through its influence * 
on theology, philosophy exercises the most potent influence upon the whole 
religious life of the church. I find Bancroft, himself no theologian, depict- 
ing in these words the influence of Jonathan Edwards' speculations with 
regard to the nature of virtue and the freedom of the will. "Edwards," he 
says, "makes a turning-point in the intellectual, or as he would have called 
it, the spiritual, history of New England. The faith condensed in the 
symbols of Calvinism demanded to be subjected to free inquiry, and ' without 
dodging, shuffling, hiding, or turning the back,' to be shown to be in har- 
mony with reason and common sense. In the age following, the influence 
of Edwards is discernible upon every leading mind. He that will trace the 
transition of Calvinism from a haughty self-assertion of the doctrine of 
election against the pride of oppression, to its adoption of love as the central 
point of its view of creation and the duty of the created, — he that will know 
the workings of the mind of New England in the middle of the last century, 
and the throbbings of its heart, must give his days and nights to the study of 
Jonathan Edwards." Thus a single philosophic mind may change for the 
better the style of religion for a whole generation, or a whole century. The 
number influenced consciously and directly by him may be few ; the great 
mass of men who come after him, may be quite unaware of his existence ; 
still his power over them is no less sure. There is a slow movement of the 
glaciers in the Alps by which the snow that fell years ago upon the summit 
of Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau comes down at last in the shape of solid ice 
to the valleys far below, and by its melting furnishes a refreshing draught 
to the tired laborer in the meadows as he throws himself upon the earth for 
his noonday meal. It is so with the speculations of abstract thinkers. Con- 
ceived upon the very mountain-tops of thought they may be, yet by a law as 
irresistible as that of gravitation they find their way downwards, through 
subordinate interpreters, and by a thousand channels of the printed page and 
the spoken word, until they reach the homes and hearts of common men. 

I have thus indicated the debt which religion, both as a system and a life, 
owes to philosophy. It cannot have escaped your notice that the same weapon 
which has struck such stout blows for Christianity has often been used 
against her. And this brings me to the second division of my theme, namely 
this : The dangers of philosophy are the dangers also of religion. I say the 
dangers of philosophy, for I cannot conceal from myself the fact that through 
the whole history of speculation there has been a constant tendency to one 
or the other of two extremes. The great principle, which Robertson so 



6 PIIILOSOrHT AND RELIGION. 

remarkably illustrated in the better portion of his teachings, that truth is 
made up of two opposite propositions and is not found in the via 
between the two, is a principle which both philosophy and theology have 
quite too often neglected. Theology, for example, has two factors given to 
her, both indisputably true, yet logically irreconcilable with one another — 
I mean, divine sovereignty and human freedom. Between these two poles 
the world of theologic thought has been r ages like a pendulum. 

And yet how often has an inveterate and unregula' 

the theologian to construct his system about one of these poles as its centre, 
while the other was virtually igr. gotten. So. in philosophy, all 

consciousn«~ duality. There are two things different in kind 

— matter and spirit. To accept the veritable existence of the one, and to 
deny the other, is to falsify the most palpable of facts. Yet an overweening 
logic has sought, in every age, to build a scheme of knowledge upon a 
one of these two elements, while the other has been pared down to fit into 
some odd niche in the temple where its twin-brother was the sole object of 
worship. Thus ha b ms of Idealism, declaring virtually that matter 

is spirit ; systems of Materialism, declaring that spirit is matter ; and then for 
^ho could not find either of these schemes to their taste, systems of 
Absolute Identity, declaring that both matter and spirit are but forms of one 
substance which underlies both, a sort of substantia una et unica. All of 
these systems, as has been well said, are seductive from their seeming sim- 
plicity, but are simple only through mutilation. Let us acknowledge that 
there is not only a passion for unity, which is native to the mind, but that 
there must be in all science a real unity of which that same mind furni?. 
the type : but let us never fail to allow the foe i jusness to decide 

the nature of that unity. Let tie modern chemist, like Youmans, believe if 
he will that all the elements of matter which have hitherto been considered 
simple are merely modifications of some one ultimate substance which 
in forms even more unlike each other than the black charcoal and the glit- 
tering diamond ; let him insist, as much as he pleases, that science already 
proclaims this to be her belief by e .he atomic weights of all her 

elements in multiples of hydrogen, and by her hypothesis that beat, motion, 
light and electricity are all forms of some one ultimate force into which 
they are mutually convertible, — but there let him stop. When he goes further 
and asserts that mind is but this same force liberated and transformed 
by chemical changes in the brain; when he declar-r - search for 

unity is so irresistible a feature of our mental constitution that we cannot 
believe in the existence of spirit and matter, but must by a necessity of 
mind resolve one into the other, or both into one, he is simply throttling 
the facts of mind, with the hope that, as dead men tell no tales, he can build 
up a complete system solely upon the facts of matter. Such a manipulation 
of facts to suit a preconceived theory falsifies the very principle of induc- 
tion upon which all science is based. To dispose of half the facts of con- 
sciousness by denying that mind is essentially distinct from matter is to 
achieve unity at the sacrifice of all our knowledge. Such a method of solv- 
ing the great problem of the universe reminds us of that grim familiar tale 
of the cannibal -chief who professed conversion, but was informed by the 
missionary that he must renounce polygamy by giving up his second wife. 



rillLOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 7 

before he could receive the ordinance of baptism. On the return of the 
missionary the following year, the chief presented himself with smiles for 
the holy rite, and on being interrogated as to what he had 'done with his 
wife, he replied with a glow of satisfaction: "Me eat her!" 

Any theory of philosophy which is based upon a monistic hypothesis, and 
which clonics the facts of either matter or mind, must exert a deadly influ- 
ence upon theology and religion. The ultimate conclusion must be that 
God is the universe or that the universe is God — in other words, there is 
no God separate from the soul or the world. And in the precise propor- 
tion to which the view of mind leans to one or the other extreme, will the 
religious thinking of the individual and the age lean towards Materialism or 
Pantheism. There are two men who have figured largely in theological con- 
troversy whose opposite conclusions may illustrate this two-fold danger. 
There is John Henry Newman — apparently concerning himself but little with 
philosophy, yet having his whole theology and life dominated by a purely 
metaphysical notion. In lis "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," he tells us that from 
his very boyhood lie carried with him a certain constitutional frame of mind 
resembling the Berkeleiah Idealism. "All the external universe" (I quote 
from a late writer), "seemed to him a deception, an angelic extravaganza, a 
spangled phantasmagory of zodiacal signs and hieroglyphics, a vivid envi- 
ronment of sacramental symbolisms and picture-writings, speaking to him 
of a Great Being, besides whom and his own soul there was no other. 
Dwelling long within the blazing cabalistic ether of his cosmological con- 
ception, till his soul had learned its language and could think in no other, 
but tenacious of a principle which had also strongly possessed him from an 
early age, that of the necessity of dogma, Dr. Newman passed on gradually but 
logically to his peculiar ecclesiasticism, and became what he has become," — - 
one of the most unquestioning adherents and advocates of the Romish faith. 
And there, on the other hand, is Joseph Priestley — beginning with a tendency 
precisely the opposite, fixing his faith on nothing which had not the evi- 
dence of sense impressed upon it, and unable even to conceive of a spiritual 
idea until he had cast it into a material mould. As you watch his mental 
progress you perceive him getting his notions of mind from retorts and 
electrical machines, until Hartley's theory of vibrations, with slight modifi- 
cations, seems to include and explain all the facts of our mental constitution. 
And from this sensational philosophy what theology was evolved? Nothing 
more nor less than a bald Socinianism which ignored all the profounder 
truths of revelation, left nothing in Christ which could be worshiped, and 
reduced Christian experience to a mere matter of the reason. Newman and 
Priestley are examples of the pernicious influence upon the theology of a phi- 
losophy which, without avowing it, leans to one of the two extremes of 
Idealism or Empiricism. I surely do not need to point you to the malign 
influences which have been exerted on a wider scale by whole systems of 
philosophy. The Sensationalism of Locke, developed and carried to its 
extremest results by Condillac and the French Encyclopaedists, poured over 
France like a torrent, sweeping away all belief in man's spiritual dignity, 
and with the conviction of human accountability and immortality, burying 
beneath the flood all idea of a God, until the Revolution came to clear away 
the rubbish and make room once more for the faiths that had been destroyed 



8 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 

And on the other hand the Kantian philosophy, with its extreme subjective 
tendencies developed by Schelling and Hegel, declared that man could 
know all by being himself the All in miniature, even as the drop of water 
can reflect upon its surface the earth beneath and all the constellations of 
the cope of heaven. While Empiricism ended in the absolute denial of a 
God, Idealism found its consummation in a Pantheistic scheme which con- 
founded the universe with God, and made all human lives and actions but 
the brilliant bubbles that rise for a moment and then disappear upon the 
endless current of impersonal and unconscious being. 

With these systems before us, and with the practical evidence of their 
power for evil in the pervading tendency and tone of modern Continental 
theology and religion and in the general skepticism of the French and Ger- 
man mind, it is vain to ignore the dangers which rise from a false philosophy. 
Yet I suspect another danger is before us, as great or even greater than any 
which Christianity has met and conquered. There is a philosophy now 
rising to power which seems to me more deadly than any other, because it 
consists in the denial of all philosophy. A philosophy of Nescience is worse 
than a philosophy of Omniscience. The one still leaves us the reality of 
mind from which to argue the existence of a God. The other, like Nero. 
when he wished that all the people of Rome had one neck that he might at 
one blow behead them all, gathers all the facts of mental consciousness 
together and by a single stroke puts them out of existence. By that same 
strobe that destroys all knowledge of the human mind you have destroyed 
all knowledge of Him who made the mind. In every production of writers 
of this class, as Lewes and Draper, you seem to hear the jubilant refrain : 
"Great Pan is dead. The age of Metaphysics has happily ended. Philos- 
ophy is forever impossible." A spontaneous vegetative life is substituted 
for the apprehension of spiritual realities. Mind is but a product of organ- 
ization and thought is only cerebration. Thus in effect man is bidden to 
act the part of the wretched miser of Bunyan's dream who bends ever 
toward the earth, gathering straws with his muck-rake, while all the while 
a golden crown hangs suspended just above him, unseen and unregarded. 
God, heaven, freedom, conscience, immortality, are all the diseased imagina- 
tions of an unscientific age. These are the logical results of a philosophy 
which starts with the denial of any direct knowledge of the mind. But there 
are thousands who accept its principles without foreseeing these results. 
The array of investigators and followers who may be classed as Positivists 
in philosophy is very great. There are great names among them. Mill 
and Bain and Spencer in England are minds of rare erudition and acumen. 
But there are lesser satellites that revolve about these suns of the system and 
reflect their light. The youthful writers for the London Times quote John 
Stuart Mill as the only authority in philosophy. There are itinerant lectur- 
ers among us who winter after winter deliver, to audiences innocent of all 
suspicion of their drift, lengthy tirades against metaphysics, and arguments 
to show that the observation of our own mental states is as impossible and 
absurd as to stand still and walk around one's self. There are in all our 
Sabbath congregations men who drink in this philosophy of Nescience from 
magazines and scientific periodicals, and who are prepared thereby to look 
upon the sermon from the pulpit as so much pleasant moonshine for purblind 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 9 

Intellects tliat cannot bear the sunlight. There are few of us, I am per- 
suaded, who realize to what extent this godless philosophy has taken hold 
of the educated minds of the generation, and has warped their views of 
religion. You see the results of it in the disposition of certain divines to 
accept Mr. Huxley as an authority with regard to the creation, and to sit at 
the feet of Baden Powell for teaching with regard to the possibility of a 
literal destruction of the world by fire. Outside the ministry it appears in 
the popular hue and cry against metaphysics, and in the increasing lack of 
sympathy with the Christian church on the part of those whose pursuits 
bring them most in contact with physical science. There has been a vast 
change in this respect in twenty years. Time was when philosophy and 
history brought the results of their investigations and laid them upon the 
altar of religion. The tendency now is to deny that there exists such a 
thing as metaphysical or moral science, and to treat as a weakness of intel- 
lect any attempt to interpret the world of matter by the world of mind. 

I do not need to tell you that the coryphfeus of this new philosophy of 
Nescience is Auguste Comte. Scarcely recognized as a thinker during his 
lifetime, he promises, now that he is dead, to be the master of the scientific 
thought of the next twenty years. His classification of the sciences, though 
chargeable with many errors, proves him to be one of the leading minds of 
the age. Every one of the fundamental principles of his philosophy, how- 
ever, is at war with a sound psychology. As a notable illustration of the 
necessity of beginning our theological thinking with correct principles of 
mind, let me point out to you two of the fundamental errors of Positivism, 
and the results to which they logically lead in our notions with regard to 
religious truth. Take for example his postulate that we know nothing but 
the phenomena of matter, and that mind, if there be such a thing, lies 
wholly out of reach of direct observation. Nothing could more plainly than 
this contradict the consciousness of men. In the same act by which I know 
matter, I know myself as distinct from matter and as knowing matter. I 
can see two things at a time, namely, self and not-self. I have knowledge of 
my own mental states by memory. I know what I was, as well as what 1 
am. To deny these deliverances of consciousness is to declare that I know 
nothing; for I have the same evidence for the existence of my own mental 
states that I have for the existence of outward phenomena. The mind is 
just as open to inspection as the world around me. The same rule that 
excludes as invalid my knowledge of myself must exclude as invalid my 
knowledge of matter. It is singular, as Mr. .Martineau has somewhere said, 
that certain philosophers take such unconscious delight in knocking out 
their own brains. Comte seems quite unaware that the same scythe with 
which he mows down the psychologists cuts off his own legs also. For how 
can science be built up of the phenomena of matter? Observation of facts 
is not science. The mere grouping of facts is not science. Science is a 
thing of the mind, and not of matter only. Unless there be a mental 
potency prior to all experience, no experience is possible. A structural 
pre-equipment of mind is necessary in order to correlate and arrange 
phenomena. The very idea of unity by which we classify facts must 
come to us from the unity of our own self-consciousness. Unless the 
primitive beliefs of substance, resemblance, power, which are a part of the 



10 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 

original endowment of the mind, and which flash out from latency into liv- 
ing energy the moment we are brought in contact with the phenomena of 
the outer world, — unless these primitive beliefs by which we mould external 
facts into shape and clothe them with meaning are just as much objects of 
knowledge, and have as much validity, as the outward facts which we know 
through the testimony of the senses, — all science is forever impossible. 
You might as well collect together a heap of arms and legs and heads from 
a dissecting room and call them living men, as to collect together mere facts 
and call them science. Science is made up of facts and ideas. If we can- 
not know anything but facts, if there be no such thing as phenomena of 
mind, if the mind be not an organism whose workings can be observed in 
consciousness, then the foundations of all knowledge are swept away, and 
the whole structure sinks "deeper than plummet ever sounded." In the 
Arabian Nights, there is a curious story of a mountain of loadstone, which 
the sailors greet with delight as the sign of some hospitable shore, where 
they may rest from the tempests of the deep. But as they draw near, the 
mighty mass of loadstone exerts its magnetic attraction upon every particle 
of iron in the vessel, until every nail and bolt is drawn from its place, and 
the ship goes to pieces, a miserable wreck. M. Comte has discovered a 
mountain of loadstone in this principle that all our knowledge is confined to 
the phenomena of matter, — it draws every fastening from his bark, and 
brings his new philosophy to total dissolution. 

A similar absurdity is involved in another great principle of this philoso- 
phy, namely, the denial of causes, both efficient and final. What-we call cause 
and effect is, it seems, only regularity of sequence. Dr. Hickok has given 
us an ingenious illustration of the principle of causality which may serve to 
set forth the precise nature of Comte's denial. Suppose two cog-wheels, 
with interlocking teeth. Each of these wheels is connected with a steam 
engine, which moves it. Both engines are working at the same rate of speed, 
so that the wheels revolve without interfering with each other. Each wheel 
obeys the impulse of its own engine, and neither is moved by the other. 
Interlocked though the cogs are, the relation between their motions is simply 
one of resemblance. But let one of these wheels be detached from the 
engine that just now moved it. To all appearance, the wheels move as 
before, yet it is plain that there is a new relation between their motions, — a 
principle of causality has come in, — the motion of the one is now the cause 
of the motion of the other. Now Comte denies the reality of any such notion 
as cause. He declares that the. wheels move together in the one case just as 
they do in the other — there is no new relation established between them 
when one engine ceases its motion. The simultaneous movement of the 
wheels in the first case, as in the last, is the sum and substance of the whole. 
What can be meant by law — where is the place for law upon this theory? 
Law must be something fixed and not phenomenal — something behind a phe- 
nomena which produces phenomena. But the only law which such a theory 
as this admits is the arbitrary succession of phenomena, without method or 
cause. In other words, instead of accepting the old axiom, ex niltilo nihil 
fit t he seems to insist that ex nihilo omnia fiunt. And so the casual judg- 
ment which we form the moment we observe phenomena, and which is just 
as stroug in the mind of the child as in the mind of the mature man, is 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 11 

resolved into a persuasion that because we have observed that each event 
follows some other event, It will probably be so again. It is not too much 
bo say that this confounding of the necessary with the customary is contra- 
dicted by the consciousness of every man and child upon the planet. By an 
irresistible law of thought, every change whatsoever is recognized to be the 
result of some power that effects the change — a power behind the phe- 
nomena and separate from them, — a power of which we have the type and 
proof in every effect which our own wills produce upon our own organism 
or upon the outward world. The natural result is that Comte has no such 
thing as an Inductive Logic, and can have none. Where there is no Causa- 
tion, there can be no law ; where there is no law, there can be no logic. And 
this is not all. By this same rule which excludes the idea of Causation, all 
the grandest intuitions of the soul are immolated, for they all rest upon the 
same evidence. We lose all proof that either spirit or matter exists back of 
the phenomena open to the senses. We have no warrant for believing that 
matter is anything more than a possibility of sensations, or that mind is 
anything more than a series of feelings aware of its own existence. Even 
mathematical truth is purely phenomenal. Two and two, it is true, make 
four with us, but it is only because we are used to it. In the planet Jupiter, 
where the customs of society are different, two and two may make five. 
There is no such thing as absolute truth. Right and wrong themselves are 
matters of convention. There is no eternal necessity in our nature which 
makes the right praiseworthy and the wrong condemnable. We have per- 
ceived the consequences of lying to be bad — we call it a vice therefore. 
But in the star Sirius, or even in the moon, where the consequences are 
more happy, lying may be a virtue. The universe is a Cosmos no longer. 
There is no will binding its parts together. The world and its events are 
but a procession of phantoms without connection or order, of whose origin, 
significance and destination we know absolutely nothing, — a conclusion of 
absolute skepticism which Lord Neaves justly ridicules in the persons of 
Mill and Hume, its advocates, by the following humorous lines : — 

" Against a stone you strike your toe ; 
You feel 't is sore, it makes a clatter; 
But what you feel is all you know 

Of toe, or stone, or mind, or matter. 
Mill and Hume of mind and matter 
Wouldn't leave a rag or tatter: 
What although 
We feel the blow? 
That doesn't show there's mind or matter. 

" Had I skill like Stuart Mill, 

His own position I could shatter ; 
The weight of Mill I count as nil, 

If Mill has neither mind nor matter. 
Mill, when minus mind and matter, 
Though he make a kind of clatter, 
Must himself 
Just mount the shelf. 
And there be laid with mind and matter." 

As if these conclusions were not sufficiently absurd, we have the direct 
denial that there is such a thing as purpose in the Universe. What are 
called marks of design are only accidental coincidences. Final causes are 



12 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 

merged in the totality of secondary causes. The sole explanation of the 
wondrous adaptations of nature to the good of man is that these are simply 
the result of mechanical laws. There is no sense in wondering at the order 
of the heavenly spheres, — with the laws that govern nature, how could there 
be any disorder? Thus the lofty thought of the classic poet that the highest 
link of nature's chain must needs be tied to the foot of Jupiter's chair is 
exchanged for the blasphemous assertion that the heavens declare, not the 
glory of God, but the glory of the Astronomer. But the followers of Comte 
convict themselves of folly by their unintentional use of language which 
implies adaptation in nature. Darwin is obliged to speak continually of the 
design of such and such a series of arrangements, as for example, that 
required for the fertilization of orchids. On Comte's own showing, there 
has been a curious design in the arrangement of all things from the very 
beginning with reference to the development at last of a true philosophy — 
a wonderful series of adaptations by which, when time was ripe and the 
world's needs greatest, a Comte was brought forth, and humanity delivered 
from its metaphysical and theologic folly. Surely a design like this, executed 
too only through unnumbered subordinate adaptations and arrangements 
of human character and history, proves a designer of endless wisdom and 
goodness. But says Maudsley, one of the Positivist camp-followers: "De- 
sign, according to Spinoza's sagacious remark, would imply imperfection in 
the designer — a necessity of adding something to himself to make up his 
sum of blessedness — and this notion involves you in a self-contradiction, 
for imperfection of any sort is inconsistent with your very idea of God." 
But what sort of a God would be Mr. Maudsley's perfect God? His only 
notion of a God must be that of a being not so great or free or active as 
ourselves — an Asiatic Brahma, as "idle as a painted ship upon a painted 
ocean." No, — the forthputting of designing wisdom and of creative power 
is not inconsistent with infinite perfection, since it is voluntary seZf-limita- 
tion, for the sake of revealing his glory. God is limited by nothing outside 
himself, but only by the decrees of his own most free and blessed will ; and 
such a self-limitation is only a proof and fruit of infinite perfection. Or 
again, when the Positivist argues that the imperfection of the design proves 
the absence of all purpose in the Universe, it is hard to tell which is to be 
most condemned, the ignorance of the objection or its presumption. It is 
the old boast of Alphonso of Castile, that if he had been present with the 
Almighty when the Universe was planned he could have suggested to him 
some valuable improvements. The Universe, it seems, can with all Its 
imperfections produce a Comte, but cannot equal his intelligence. Or, If 
a serious reply must be made to an argument so shallow, we might show 
that the whole tendency of modern science, may, the very principle that 
guides her in all her researches, is to take for granted that there must be 
adaptations and uses in things whose purpose and design have hitherto been 
hidden. Increasing knowledge has only taught her that everything is for 
some end, — and even if it were ultimately discovered that there was organic 
imperfection in the System, it would only prove a deeper adaptation of that 
system to man's state of conscious moral discord and evil, an adaptation 
revealing to him the ruin sin has wrought, and exciting in him longings for 
the deliverance from bondage of the whole creation of God. 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 13 

The tendencies of a philosophy built upon such principles as these are 
too manifest to require elucidation. They tear up Philosophy by the roots, 
and Religion must share the fate of Philosophy. One of Comte's grandest 
generalizations indeed is this, that theology and metaphysics are relics of 
the race's infancy, necessary stages in human progress, but to be regarded 
in these days only as stepping-stones which may he removed, now that we 
have risen by them from infancy to manhood. Biology is only a part of 
physiology ; brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile ; man, to use 
Dr. Holmes' simile, is only "a drop of water imprisoned in a crystal, one 
little particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe." All his higher 
ideas of that Universe, its forms of beauty, its divine arrangements, its moral 
influences, are cast aside as worthless. All his noblest intuitions — substance 
causation, law, freedom, conscience, accountability, immortality — are met- 
aphysical or theological chimseras 1 . There is no place for sin nor for repent- 
ance. There is no God to direct the blind, resistless forces of nature, or to 
hear and answer the cry that rises from the desolate heart of man. In the 
terrible language of Holyoake. one of the advocates of this Atheistic creed: 
"Science has shown us that we are under the dominion of general laws, and 
that there is no special Providence. Nature acts with fearful uniformity; 
stern as fate, absolute as tyranny, merciless as death ; too vast to praise, too 
inexplicable to worship, to inexorable to propitiate; it has no ear for prayer, 
no heart for sympathy, no arm to save." With such a picture of the Uni- 
verse before us, we seem enshrouded by the darkness of Byron's dream : 

" The bright sun is extinguished, and the stars 
Do wander darkling in the eternal space, 
Rayless and pathless ; and the icy earth 
Swings blind and blackening in the moonless air. 
Morn comes and goes — and comes, but brings no day, 
And men forget their passions in the dread 
Of this their desolation, and all hearts 
Are chilled into a selfish prayer for light. 

************* 

The waves are dead; the tides are in their grave; 
The moon, their mistress, has expired before; 
The winds are withered in the stagnant air, 
And the clouds perished ; Darkness had no need 
Of aid from them — She was the Universe." 

And Comte himself has given us proof, if any such were needed, that the 
human soul revolts at the picture of a universe without a God, and has an 
instinct implanted in its very constitution which cannot be satisfied without 
some semblance of worship. The latter speculations of the great Postivist 
aimed at nothing less than the establishment of a new religion which should 
dispense with the notion of a Deity or a revelation, a religion of which 
Comte himself was to be Sovereign Pontiff and Supreme Lawgiver. The 
object of adoration is Collective Humanity or the totality of all the forces 
engaged in the perfecting of the race, embracing therefore the solid earth 
itself which supports this race, — the former to be designated as the " Great 
Being" and the latter as the "Great Fetish." Three hundred and sixty- 
five of the world's benefactors are chosen to represent humanity as objects 
of worship, and the statues of all these are set up in the Pantheon of the 
new religion that each day of the year may have its special saint for com- 



14 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 

memoration. For the separate weeks and months there are dii majores, 
or greater gods, and among them Confucius, Voltaire, and Mahomet, though 
no place is found for Christ. For private devotion, there is the adoration 
of the mother, the wife, the daughter. An ejaculatory prayer is proposed 
consisting of the following words: "Love as our principle; order as our 
basis; progress as our end." Instead of the sign of the Cross, so common 
in the Romish Church, the three principal cerebral organs are to be thought- 
fully touched by the finger. For priests there is a College of Savants; for 
sacraments there are birthday, wedding and funeral rites ; for the last 
judgment there is a posthumous decision of learned men upon the merits 
or demerits of the dead ; the fame of this decision stands for immortality, 
and a civilized earth is made to serve for heaven. Such is the substitute 
for the religion of the Bible, proposed by the Atheistic philosopher. Re- 
volting at the childishness of worshiping God, he constructs a religion in 
which the race shall worship man. With such poetic justice is the truth 
avenged. With such unconsciousness of its own n;iture does the wisdom 
of this world prove itself to be foolishness in the sight of God. 

What has been said will prepare you for the few words in which I shall 
present the last thought of my subject. It is this: An Impartial philosophy 
is essential to the perfect triumph of religion. If the universal sway of 
Christianity is to be brought about in accordance with the common laws of 
mind, it would seem that a true philosophy must be one of God's chosen 
weapons for subduing the world to Christ. Christianity has not only noth- 
ing to fear from a true science of the mind, but she must recognize in such 
science her indispensable coadjutor and ally. The stress of the argument 
against Christianity among investigators of physical truth is not so much 
theological as it is philosophical, and this fact is but the illustration of that 
wider principle enunciated by Sir William Hamilton, that "there is no 
difficulty emerging in theology which has not first emerged in philosophy." 
In spite of M. Comte, philosophy will exist while the world stands. It is 
time for the Christian church and >the Christian ministry to understand its 
power, and instead of deploring its influence or treating it with shallow 
contempt, to use every effort to bring it into the service of Christ. As the 
greatest thinker of New England said a century ago: "There is no need 
that strict philosophical truth be at all concealed from men — no danger in 
contemplation and discovery in these things. The truth is extremely need- 
ful to be known, and the more clearly and perfectly the real fact is known, 
and the more constantly kept in view, the better. The clear and full knowl- 
edge of the true system of the universe will greatly establish the true 
Christian Scheme of divine administration in the City of God." I 
have done then, once for all, with the notion that metaphysical studies are 
beside the proper work of the preacher, and by necessity mystify his brain 
and destroy his practical power. The history of the church has shown that 
philosophy, instead of weakening the grasp and corrupting the principles 
of her preachers, has been their great discipline and strength. No man 
can clearly present or successfully defend the truths of religion without 
knowing them in their principles. A teacher of religion who sneers at 
metaphysics, as if it were a fog-Jbank in which only fools would risk their 
lives, is simply playing into the hands of infldelity and virtually declaring 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 15 

that all true philosophy is on the side of the enemies of religion. To fill 
his place as a preacher in these days he must know the foundations of his 
faith in the human consciousness; must have some proper sense of those 
grand primitive affirmations of the soul, which, 

" be they what they may. 
Are yet the fountain-light of all onr day, 
Are yet the master-light of all our seeing." 

He must be able to show the dabbler in an Atheistic philosophy whither 
the principles he has ignorantly adopted will lead him; how completely 
these principles affront the reason and mock the religious nature of man ; 
how they are based upon a single primary misconception with regard to the 
sources of our knowledge ; how a simple confidence in the original intuitions 
of the mind will restore to us the, world, the soul and God ; how that confi- 
dence is the indispensable basis of all science, while a denial of a single one 
of these original convictions is like 

" the little rift within the lute, 
That by and by will make the music mute, 
And, ever widening, slowly silence all." 

It is the business of the preacher to know the false philosophy which 
threatens to leaven society, in order that in its place he may put the true. 
And this he can do in a thousand ways. Formal metaphysical disquisitions 
in the pulpit will never accomplish anything; but the incidental statement 
in sermon and correspondence and conversation of the fundamental errors 
of a false philosophy, accompanied by a simple reductio ad absurdum, will 
open the eyes of many who have unconsciously imbibed notions hostile to 
the true faith. The preacher is not only bound by his duty to God never 
to despair of philosophy himself, but is under obligation to labor and to 
pray that a true philosophy may uproot the false, and prepare the way for 
the final triumph of religion. 

A true philosophy ! It has been the dream and quest of earth's noblest 
spirits. But have they discovered the object of their search? Must not 
the world still ask: "Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place 
of understanding?" We answer both yes and no. There has always been 
a true philosophy in the world side by side with the false. Side by side 
with the philosophies of Epicurus and the Stoics, partial in their sources 
and their results, dwelt for ages the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, 
both spiritual and both theistic, though differing largely in their methods 
and their spirit. And between our modern philosophies of Nescience 
and Omniscience there exists a sober philosophy represented by men like 
James McCosh, that aims to give to all the facts of human consciousness 
their proper weight and to maintain the faith of those sublime intuitions 
by which we cognize the existence of the World, the Soul, and God. 
As in theology, there are a thousand questions yet to solve, and with 
regard to many that are fundamental there is still diversity of opinion 
among the best of thinkers. Yet still the priests of God and the priests 
of Baal are easy to distinguish from each other, and in philosophy as 
well as theology the cry may still be echoed: "If the Lord be God, serve 
him ; but if Baal, serve him !" Nor was there ever yet a day when the 
signs of the times were more hopeful for a true philosophy. As error with 



16 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 

regard to the person of Ohrist reached its extremest results In both direc- 
tions and exhausted itself in the first centuries of Christianity, so error in 
philosophy seems to have rendered this service for the truth, of showing to 
what heights and depths of folly and ruin a partial philosophy in either 
direction may lead. The day has dawned already in which philosophic 
investigation is carried on in the true inductive method and begins with the 
fundamental facts of consciousness — the intuitive knowledge of matter, of 
mind, of God, and of each as distinct and differing in nature from the 
others. Let a man hold fast to the deliverance that he has a face-to-face 
knowledge of the eternal world, of his own mind, and of the existence and 
presence of God, and he may defy all the arts of a false philosophy to lead 
him astray. 

Just in proportion to the extent to which these fundamental convictions 
are ignored or obscured does fatal error creep into our reasonings. Phi- 
losophy is just beginning to settle her debt with Sir William Hamilton, who, 
with all his splendid contributions to a true science of the mind, still, by 
his notion of the relativity of human knowledge and his virtual denial of a 
direct knowledge of matter, left the door ajar for a subtle Idealism to enter 
and prepared the way for Mansel's resolution of the whole material of our 
religious faith into sheer contradiction. I know matter as something exter- 
nal to myself. I may learn a thousand things about it, but my knowledge 
of its existence can never be more perfect. To say that the external sub- 
stance furnishes six of the twelve parts of my conception, while the organs 
by which I perceive it furnish three, and the mind itself three, is virtually to 
deny that we have any face-to-face knowledge of matter at all. And so to 
relegate our idea of the divine existence to the realm of faith, because, 
forsooth, any proper knowledge of God would require an apprehension of 
the manner in which infinite attributes coexist to form one object is to 
deny one of the simplest facts of consciousness. There may be a thousand 
facts about God, of which I am ignorant, but my mind cognizes his exist- 
ence and presence for all that. As another has said: "The African on the 
banks of the Niger may be altogether ignorant of its source and termination, 
but it would not be right on that account to deny that he has any knowledge 
of the river, and it would be equally wrong to deny that we can know God, 
merely on the ground that we do not and cannot grasp his infinite attributes." 
To tell me that this knowledge of God, "wherein standeth my eternal life," 
possesses no external validity, and to inscribe upon the temple of religion 
the legend "To the Unknown God," is simply to sweep away the founda- 
tions of all knowledge. The clearness and power of this intuitive knowledge 
may be dimmed and blunted by sin. To see God revealed to my soul as 
distinctly as I see the forms of my fellow-men may belong to me only In 
those clearer moments to which here and hereafter the pure in heart may 
come, but still the fact remains that an Intuitive knowledge of God, dis- 
torted, blunted, overlaid with a thousand superstitious fancies though it be. 
belongs to man as man, revealing itself in his consciousness of the Infinite 
around him and in his fears of the judgment before him. This conception 
of God is not the straining forward of the soul iuto an unknown abyss, as 
Kant maintained, nor is it a mere negation of all bounds and limits, as 
Hamilton fancied ; for both these philosophers, in their constant declarations 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 17 

that God is, and that he is a God of truth, declare in effect that, apart from 
all faith, they have substantial knowledge of God and of certain of his 
attributes. As "there is a spirit in man, and the Inspiration of the Almighty 
giveth li i 111 understanding," the very height and glory of his nature is that 
he may look into the face of God and say: "My Father !" To wakeu this 
intuition into living power and to restore the actual communion of the soul 
with God, Christ has come, and in him who is '"the brightness of the 
Father's glory and the express image of his person" we who once were so 
involved in "the dark windings of the material and earthy" that we dared 
scarcely say "we have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear," can declare 
with joy that "now our eye sooth Thee." This grandest intuition of the 
soul it is ours to interpret, to illustrate, to defend, by voice and pen, in 
heart and life. Men may mistake it and deny it, but its establishment upon 
a scientific basis is the test and the goal of a rrue philosophy. We may 
eacb do something toward the grand result, not only by the service of the 
iutelleot, but by living every day "as seeing Him who is invisible," and 
from our own certainty of the truth commending it to others. The noble 
lines with which Wordsworth concludes "The Prelude" set forth the 
preacher's work no less than the poet's : 

" Prophets of nature, we to them may speak 
A lasting inspiration, sanctified 
By reason, blest by faith; what we have loved 
Others will love, and we will teach them how ; 
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes 
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth 
On which he dwells, above this frame of things 
In beauty exalted, as it is itself 
Of quality and fabric more divine." 

Upon the side of the great entrance-hall of the Royal Museum in Berlin 
is painted a colossal picture of Kaulbach's, which unites more than any 
other picture in the world the interest of history and poetry, of weird imagi- 
nation and symbolic lore. It represents that last battle between the Romans 
and the Huns, which decided the fate of European civilization. The story 
goes that the hosts on either side fought desperately for three long days, 
until the greater part of the combatants were slain, and the rest, worn out 
with the conflict, fell to the ground in heavy sleep. But as the night came 
on, the spirits of the slain, still fierce and restless even in death, rose from 
their bodies and held a still and awful battle in the air. This shadowy 
combat Kaulbach has painted. There, on the right, comes Attila, the 
"scourge of God," borne aloft upon a shield, and leading on his barbarians 
to death or victory. And there Theodoric, the Roman leader, advances to 
meet him, with sword in hand and the cross behind. The picture is 
wonderful for its vivid portraiture of deadly conflict, but far more for its 
symbolic teaching that the battle which determined the future of Chris- 
tianity and of the world was not so much a battle of men and spears as a 
battle between the spirit of two opposing civilizations, a battle in which 
subtle and shadowy principles contended for the mastery of the world. So, 
brethren, let us never forget amid the practical noise and strife of our life- 
work, that above our heads another battle is going on, in which our strug- 
gling finds its only true significance. The battle of the ages is a battle of 
2 



IS PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION". 

principles, and he who has most possessed himself of the knowledge of that 
upper warfare will best conduct the light amid the clang of arms and the 
shock of opposing battalions. Let us thank God that the issue is not 
doubtful. Though the armies of error are more subtle and more fierce than 
those shadowy barbarians that follow after Attila, the hosts of God tat 
stronger still, for the Cross is with them, and by that sign they conquer ! 



II. 

SCIENCE AND RELIGION.* 



The annual festival which brings us together marks the close of another 
year's professional instruction, and the completion by many before me of 
their whole preparatory training for the work and business of life. The 
friendships cemented by common pursuits and aspirations are soon to exist 
only in memory, and the hard tests of practical life are to decide how much 
of manly energy and sagacity and principle there is on which to build a per- 
manent success. It is a noble profession to which you have bound your- 
selves. There is but one which can rival it in dignity. The three great 
learned guilds are one in their object, and one in their method of work. All 
have in view the good of human kind. All base their hope of good upon 
the study of God's laws. He must be a shallow and unworthy representative 
of the legal profession whose highest conception of it is that of a money- 
making trade, and whose mind, with all its matching of precedents and 
forging of arguments, never once finds in the law the dim reflection of God's 
eternal justice and truth. And he must be a sorry doctor who never loses 
sight of selfish comfort or reputation in disinterested service of humanity, 
and who forgets that in every case of disease that comes beneath his eye are 
illustrated the highest truths of God's great creation of mind and matter. The 
physician is brought face to face with the saddest and solemnest aspects of 
human life — he should be a wise and humble man ; he has piteous hands held 
out to him for help — he should be a man of tender human feeling, while he 
is yet careful and calm ; he must again and again see the soul hovering be- 
tween two worlds and at last passing away like the spark of an extinguished 
taper, — he should be a truly religious man. 

The great German dramatist puts into the mouth of one of his characters 
the words: "Respect the dreams of thy youth." I cannot believe that one 
of those whom I especially address is destitute of some such high ideal of 
professional beneficence and character. Yet at the same time you will not 
deem it unkind if I remind you that the dust of our life-struggle often 
obscures to us the lofty beacon-lights that guide our way ; and that, with all 
pursuits of natural science, Medicine shares the common danger of forget- 
ting those spiritual facts which give to its conclusions all their validity and 
significance. Those whose occupation and principal study of life it is to 
adjust applications of the great laws of chemistry and dynamics, and who 
are exercised but little in subjects and fields of thought external to mere 
nature, come often to be practical unbelievers in anything but nature. Con- 



*An Address delivered at the Commencement of the Medical College, 
Cleveland, February 18, 1867. 

19 



20 SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 

tinually occupied with the phenomena of the body and Its effects on the 
mind, even the physician sometimes finds it hard to admit within his scheme 
of filings anything supernatural or beyond the cognizance of the senses. 
The theologian is sometimes guilty of the opposite fault, — while nature and 
the supernatural together constitute the one system of God, he ofttimes 
ignores the results of science and decries her methods. Religion and science 
will never understand each other, or find terms of harmonious cooperation, 
until the great truth is recognized by each that observation aud conscious- 
ness are alike sources of knowledge, and that equal validity is to be ascribed 
to the ascertained results of metaphysical and moral inquiry with that which 
we ascribe to the processes of natural research. It is my profound convic- 
tion that neither the scientific man nor the moral philosopher can achieve 
success in the building up of his own system, or in the symmetrical develop- 
ment of his own character, so long as either disdains the pursuits of the 
other. The two systems are complementary to each other, and ea<h without 
the other is fragmentary and incomplete. The greatest possible heresy on 
the part of either is to play the empiric hy assuming that its system com 
prises the whole of truth, and that there is no knowledge but that which 
comes through its peculiar method. Such partiality and egotism is foreign 
to the true scientific spirit. I doubt not, therefore, that your training here 
has favorably disposed you toward the theme which I desire to elucidate, 
namely, the indissoluble connection between physical and metaphysical in- 
quiry, or what is much the same thing, the mutual dependence of science 
and religion. 

My first proposition is that no system of thought deserves the name of 
true science which does not recognize the existence and importance of a 
realm of metaphysical, moral and spiritual truth, side by side with the great 
fields of physical inquiry. Though many are prone to deny it, there is such 
a thing as metaphysical science. The observation and classification of phe- 
nomena do not by any means comprise all that is possible in scientific 
research. By the word phenomena I mean here the phenomena perceptible 
to the senses. If used in the larger sense, which embraces all that occurs 
or reveals itself within the mind as well as without, the word phenomena 
may include within its scope all the raw material of our knowledge. There 
are phenomena of mind as well as of matter. Self-consciousness is as valid 
a source of knowledge as consciousness of the outer world. And it is the 
merest begging of the question for the Positivist to declare that only the 
phenomena of sense are to be recognized as of any value in scientific inquiry. 
The results of intellectual philosophy are just as real and valuable as the 
results of physical investigation, and to say that accepted moral truth has 
no other basis than faith, while physical truth is positive in any peculiar 
sense, is simply to deny the dicta of consciousness. Mental and spiritual 
facts are just as demonstrable, though by a different kind of evidence, as 
the facts of the visible and material universe around us. Let us strip away 
the mystery and prejudice that envelope that much-abused word, metaphysi- 
cal. It means nothing but that which is beyond the sphere of the physical. 
For example, I burn my hand in the flame of this gas-burner. The gas, the 
flame, the disintegration of the tissues of my hand, are physical facts ; but 
do these comprise an exhaustive summary of the case? Some philosophers 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 2l 

would say so. But I fancy any man of common sense would feel called 
upon to put clown certain other facts,- — first, namely, a decided conscious- 
ness on my part that I was burned, and that I was a fool for putting my 
hand in the blaze. Now this perception of pain, this consciousness of folly, 
are not physical facts but metaphysical ones, and no one could ever persuade 
me that here was not a case for metaphysical inquiry- A similar test might 
be proposed for ascertaining the existence of human freedom and responsi- 
bility. If any man declares himself a fatalist, and assures you that human 
life and action are only unalterable links in the great chain of necessity that 
fast binds the universe, — suppose you knock him down, — the consequence 
Is that he immediately rises up convinced of your freedom and responsibility, 
and considers these metaphysical facts at least, as sufficiently established, to 
warrant a process of law against you. 

Upon such metaphysical facts science itself rests, and without them would 
be impossible. Science cannot proceed a step in her observations or demon- 
strations without assuming great truths which no experience has ever given 
her, and which she is obliged to receive by faith before she can set out at 
all on her voyage of discovery. Faith is a fundamental principle in philos- 
ophy just as much as in religion. You cannot get out of self to begin any 
investigation, without first assuming that you are different from the world 
around you, and that the faculties which assure you of the world's existence 
are truthful in their deliverances. Yet what evidence have you of these 
facts? None whatever, except that you have a nature preceding all your 
conscious thought, and underlying all your mental action, — a nature which 
your will did not create, — a nature which renders it impossible for you not 
to believe that your primitive cognitions are substantial verities. In the 
words of Fichte : "We are all born in faith." Faith in our mental powers 
as the sources of knowledge is a part of our nature. All science rests, there- 
fore, in the last analysis, on faith, not on the deductions of reason : and the 
proudest contemner of religious faith builds his whole structure of knowledge 
on a basis of precisely the same character. And who can say that there may 
not be dormant in the soul the capacity of a higher faith, which divine influ- 
ences may wake to activity, just as outward influences first wake to manifes- 
tation these other primitive intuitions of the mind? Who has a right to 
despise the edifice of religious knowledge, which equally with all scientific 
knowledge rests upon a foundation in the nature itself which all the storms 
of reasoning can never shake? And who will not see something more than 
mere poetry in those noble words of Tennyson : 

" Strong Son of God, Immortal Love. 
Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith and faith alone embrace. 
Believing where we cannot prove ! 

••' Thou wilt not leave us in the dust ; 
Thou madest man, he knows not why ; 
He thinks he was not made to die; 
And thou hast made him: thou art just." 

Take the terms which science most uses, — "law," "cause," "order," — 
and a slight examination will suffice to show that all their meaning and value 
consist in conceptions they derive from the realm of the metaphysical and 
spiritual. Suppose a case of acute disorder in the system comes under 



22 SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 

jour notice, — let it be a case of poisoning. You instantly inquire the cans?, 
jiiid you proceed to administer some agent to counteract the poison, or expel 
il from the system. But you could not do either of these without having in 
mind the idea of causation, — an idea which the more succession of events 
never can give you, — an idea which is derived only from your own conscious- 
ness of power to produce effects in your physical organism, — in other words, 
from the metaphysical fact of will. And how could we know or love or seek 
order in the universe, — how could we begin to classify facts or reduce them 
to system, — if our own inward experience did not reveal to us a unity of 
being there, amid a multiplicity of manifestations? It is only the meta- 
physical consciousness of the oneness of self that leads us to seek unity in 
nature, or that enables us to interpret nature as a divinely constituted 
cosmos or order. 

The absolute impossibility of ridding ourselves of these metaphysical 
conceptions is shown again and again in the involuntary slips of the pen by 
which those who deny the validity of all primitive cognitions are yet com- 
pelled to testify to their reality and to their silent presence through all the 
steps of their reasoning. John Stuart Mill, for example, though declaring 
in one breath that the very idea of cause is a delusion of the imagination 
and that we know only of the existence of fixed sequences in creation, is 
notwithstanding forced, when he comes to define "quality," to call it the 
cause of sensation, thus recognizing involuntarily the very metaphysical 
conception which he has been combating. And Comte, the French phil- 
osopher, while denying any validity to consciousness, is yet found saying 
that "man at first knows nothing but himself" and that "the phenomena 
of life are known by immediate consciousness." So impossible is it, if we 
build at all, to avoid building upon the solid ground of original intuition 
which underlies all our mental operations. You cannot even conceive of 
any material object, bounded as it is on every side and separated from 
other objects, except as existing in space, which is unbounded and includes 
all objects. You cannot think of any event as transpiring in time without 
at the same time conceiving of endless duration before and after, in which 
the event has place. You cannot help believing in infinite space and time, 
— you cannot even conceive of any limitation of them. Yet these infinite 
realities you never saw with your bodily eyes, — the conception came to 
you from the mind. And so you believe that every change is the result of 
power exerted somewhere and somehow ; but this idea of causality is not 
from the world without but from the world within, and "without this 
action of mind upon its objects, the little world of man's knowledge would 
be not a cosmos but a chaos — not a system of parts having mutual relation 
to each other but an endless succession of isolated phantoms coming and 
going one by one." 

Thus I would justify my first proposition, that no system of thought 
deserves the name of true science that does not recognize the existence and 
importance of a realm of metaphysical, moral and spiritual truth side by 
side with the great fields of physical inquiry. The facts of the one are just 
as important as the facts of the other, and however one's natural tastes may 
lead him to prefer one line of investigation to the other, he yet owes it to 
science and to himself to complement his knowledge of his own department 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 23 

by the acceptance of ascertained results in the other, or at least by the 
recognition of another sphere whose exploration is as important as that or 
his own. Tlie tendency of thought in all ages, however, has been toward one 
of the two opposite poles. Idealism and Materialism have alternately held 
sway, and the world, in the heat of controversy between them, has forgotten 
that the rounded globe of truth must have two poles, not one. There is 
truth in both, but either taken singly is false by defect. And while every 
man, as has been said, is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist, it is all the 
more important that the balance should be calmly held between the two. The 
fatal tendency to merge matter in mind or mind in matter, and so convert the 
universe into one substance, can only be counteracted by a study of both. 
Such study 'teaches us on the one hand that knowledge of external things can 
never be accounted for by resolving it into self-knowledge, for the latter is 
just as inexplicable as the former. We know self and we know the world. 
and we know that self is different from the world, and that is the end of all 
pantheistic idealism. But on the other hand the same study teaches us that 
self-knowledge can never be resolved into a mere phenomenon of matter ; 
no muscular or nervous vibrations are identical with sensation or perception ; 
and to call the high achievements of human reason the mere necessary 
products of blood and brain is beyond measure degrading to science and to 
the soul. 

Yet to this the study of nature must lead us if It be not balanced by 
considerations from another department of knowledge. Nature alone gives 
us no conception of mind or of God, for it is different from mind or God. 
Let us pity the man whose whole scheme of nature has no room in it for 
those higher ideas which give nature all her grandeur and glory. "I can 
conceive a severe science," says F. W. Robertson in one of his letters, 
"compelling a mind step by step to atheistic conclusions; and that mind, 
loyal to truth, refusing to ignore the conclusions or to hide them. But 
then I can only conceive this done in a noble sadness, and a kind of divine 
infinite pity towards the race which is so bereft of its best hopes. I have 
no patience with a self-complacent smirk which says : ' Shut up the prophets ; 
read Harriet Martineau and Atkinson. Friendship, Patriotism, are mes- 
merized brain; Faith, a mistake of the stomach; Love, a titillatory move- 
ment occurring in the upper part of the nape of the neck ; Immortality, the 
craving of dyspepsia ; God, a fancy produced by a certain pressure upon 
the gray parts of the hasty-pudding within the skull ; Shakespeare, Plato. 
Ca?sar, and all they did and wrote, weighed by an extra ounce or two of said 
pudding.' " This rough-shod criticism of a nobly indignant mind is a 
reductio ad ahsurdum of those conceptions of nature which would take 
out from it its very life and soul. When Buckle and Draper exhibit to us 
a list of statistical averages to prove that certain actions recur with uniform 
frequency in certain periods of time, they would have us infer that the free 
will of man is a mere figment of the imagination, and that the limits which 
are placed around human actiou reduce it to the law of necessity. They 
forget that, in the case they bring forward, law does not fetter the individual 
but only affects men in the mass. This is unlike gravitation, for gravitation 
acts equally and universally upon all matter. Every apple let go from the 
hand must fall, but not every man must act so and so. We infer from these 



24 SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 

statistical averages merely that divine foresight has fixed bounds to human 
action, but that action itself is no less free within its sphere. The whole 
error of these physicists lies in their persistent determination to interpret 
the phenomena of mind by the conceptions they have received from matter; 
ot in the words of James Martineau, '"to push dynamics into the conquest 
of history and mankind, and to coerce the universe of life and persons 
into the formulas applicable to things." 

While then any monistic theory is false, whether its leanings be toward 
Idealism or Materialism, and while it is true that both departments of human 
research must be included in any complete system of science, it becomes a 
most serious question which of these two co-ordinate realms shall furnish 
the interpretation for the other. After what I have said you will not be 
surprised to hear my second and last proposition, namely, that nature must 
be interpreted by our knowledge of mind, and not mind and its phenomena by 
our knowledge of nature; in other words, the governing conception in man 
must be also the governing conception in nature. Man has been well called 
a microcosm — a little world in himself — an image of the great world of 
matter and mind outside of him. It is this embracing in himself of the two 
that qualifies him to sit as judge of both; and his own being must be the 
measured segment of the arc, by which he triangulates the vast universe of 
being that stretches away on every side around him. The senses tell him 
of a physical organism subject to natural laws ; but is this the whole of his 
nature? Ah. no! another inward sense tells him of the possession of 
endowments totally different in kind from those of matter. He has mind ; 
there are in him life, knowledge, will, conscience, — and nature has none of 
these. Now, of these two parts of a man, which is the dominant one? I 
know that there are men like Emerson to affirm that man is here, not to 
work, bnt to be worked upon. I know that there are men like Youmans to 
suggest that by mere transformation a force, existing as motion, heat, or 
light, can become a mode of consciousness ; and that emotions and thoughts 
are simply another form of forces which are liberated by chemical changes 
in the brain. But in reply to this theory, which in its tendencies Is purely 
materialistic and atheistic, we have only to bring forward the evidence of 
consciousness, that testifies clearly that mind is not subject to the laws of 
matter, but that it holds sway over these and can bend these to its purpose. 
Man conquering nature is the very idea of modern civilization. I do not 
mean that any one of nature's laws can be changed at his caprice, but I 
mean that man has been endowed with the power to put those laws in new 
combinations, and so make them his slaves to do his bidding. 

A single act of man's will may set in motion a train of natural operations 
which never could have occurred without his agency, and yet which con- 
tinue working of themselves after be has withdrawn his hand. To use an 
illustration of Janet's: "I kindle a fire in my grate. I only intervene to 
produce and combine together the different agents whose natural action 
behooves to produce the effect I have need of; but the first step once taken, 
til the phenomena constituting combustion engender each other conformably 
to their laws without a new intervention of the agent, so that an observer 
who shall study the series of these phenomena, without perceiving the first 
band that had prepared all, could not seize that hand in any special act. and 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 25 

yet there is a preconceived plan and combination," and the whole series of 
efi'ects may be traced back to the action of one mind and will. So Diman 
has well said that "when laws are conceived of, not as single but as com- 
bined, instead of being immutable in their operation, they are the agencies 
of ceaseless change. Phenomena are governed, not by invariable forces, but 
by endlessly varying combinations of invariable forces;" and we may add 
that while these combinations are to a considerable extent in the hands of 
man, so that by combining the laws of chemical attraction and combustion 
he can fire the gunpowder and split the solid rock asunder, these combina- 
tions are to an unlimited extent in the hands of God, so that, without sus- 
pension of natural laws but rather through these laws, he can interpose to 
produce providential or even miraculous results in nature, which nature left 
to herself would never be able to accomplish. 

What I contend for, then, is simply this : that while nature's laws are 
rigid, there is a power superior to those laws and exempt from their control, 
namely, the power of the personal will — and that in this will of man we 
have an instance of an efficient cause in the highest sense of that term, 
acting among and along with the physical causes of the material world, and 
producing results which would not have been brought about by any invari- 
able sequence of physical causes left to their own action. We have evi- 
dence, in fine, of an elasticity in the constitution of nature, which permits 
the. influence of human power on the phenomena of the world to be exercised 
or suspended at will, without affecting in the least the stability of the great 
system of things. If I throw a stone into the air, its fall is determined by 
natural laws, but can any man say that my throwing it was the mere result 
of natural laws? Nay, my free-will, something above nature, has done it, 
nor has any law of nature been violated therein. 

In this conception of personal will we find the only key to the interpreta- 
tion of nature. We talk about the forces of nature — or about the different 
forms that force takes on — magnetism, light, heat, motion, — but what do we 
know about force itself, except by our own consciousness of power exerted 
in every act of will? That is the only force of which we have immediate 
knowledge, and we know it to have its centre and source in our own person- 
ality. And so when we see a change in nature we instantly attribute it to the 
exertion of some unseen power, — the very laws of our mental constitution 
forbid us to conceive of that change as blind and causeless. There is force 
everywhere in nature — the moving world in all its successions and changes 
is bound together by some all-pervading force, which, assuming different 
forms, produces life and beauty and order. But our minds refuse to rest in 
this idea of force — we cannot even conceive of it except as having its source 
and centre in a personal intelligence and will analogous to our own. The 
very same faculties whose veracity guarantees the existence of the outward 
world guarantee also the existence of One whose wisdom shapes that world 
and conserves its being and brings about its regular successions from day 
to day. The universe is not a great machine self-erected and running its 
endless courses by virtue of some blind tendency to self-development. 
There is no real power that has not its seat in mind, and every change 
in the relations of matter is evidence of the presence of a superintending 
wisdom and of a divine will that upholds all things by its word. And so. 



2G SCIEiNCE AND RELIGION. 

instead of asserting with some of our modern physicists that the highest 
law of all science, the most far-reaching principle that adventuring reason 
has discovered in the universe, is the conservation of force, — we may with 
greater reverence say that science itself, in its highest sense, points to a 
principle high above all force and all the laws of force, namely, the personal 
will of the omnipresent and omnipotent God. 

We recognize accordingly, in our own consciousness of will-power and in 
our own experience of its exercise, a clue to the explanation of the world 
without us, its forces and its origin. But there is another fact in our mental 
operations which sheds yet further light upon the meaning of nature, and 
that is our consciousness of purpose. We not only work, but we work 
toward ends. In ourselves, we recognize not only the principle of cause, 
but also the principle of final cause. I am myself convinced that the belief 
that all things have their ends is a primitive and universal one; that this 
alone gives a rational unity to the whole system of things ; that this alono 
renders induction possible. I can argue from one thing to another only 
upon the assumption that things in the universe correspond to each other; 
in other words, that each has been made to fill its place in the system, that 
each exists for a purpose. But whether it be a primitive belief or not, it is 
at any rate a working principle of all science. Science could make no 
progress, indeed could make no beginnings, if she did not take for granted 
that there must be adaptations and uses in things whose purpose and design 
have hitherto been hidden. 

There are two ways in which this rational interpretation of nature is 
sought to be refuted. The older and fortunately now somewhat antiquated 
method, of which Comte was the representative, is that of denying that 
there is any such thing as purpose in nature. What once seemed marks of 
design are called accidental coincidences. Final causes are merged in 
the totality of efficient causes. But later writers have felt the necessity 
of recognizing the principle of finality in nature, of ends toward which 
the universe and its various parts are working ; — yet they are unwil- 
ling to grant that there is a superintending wisdom which at all an- 
swers to the Christian idea of God. The result has been the announce- 
ment of the principle of immanent finality, of unconscious intelligence. 
And to this second interpretation of nature a large part of our modern 
scientists are inclined to give in their adhesion. They point to the Instinct 
of the bee which builds its hexagons and provides its winter store without 
consciousness of the end its labor is to subserve. They point to the uncon- 
scious formation of language — a whole people for centuries shaping and 
perfecting a vehicle for thought — yet without consultation with each other or 
understanding of the harmonious structure which they are reariug. They 
point to the work of the world's greatest geniuses in music and in literature, 
and claim that the perfection of art is characterized by spontaneity, absence 
of forethought, in short, unconscious intelligence. So they would have us 
believe that the spirit that moves and works in the universe is also an uncon- 
scious intelligence, and that the marvelous results of order and beauty which 
we see about us are but the unpurposed ends toward which an impersonal 
force has been working. 

There are very many arguments which might be urged against this con- 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 21 

r 

eeption of nature, but we cau notice only one. It loses sight of man. It 
Is" the universe that is to be accounted for, and the theory expressly holds 
that man is a part of the universe. If there were no such thiiig as conscious 
freedom and conscious purpose anywhere, if animal Intelligence were the 
highest, then there would be nothing so impossible in the hypothesis that 
undesigning creatures wore an outgrowth of undesigning intelligence. But 
the moment that man is taken into the account, we have a problem which 
this philosophy can never solve — the problem how the conscious is to be 
explained from the nnconscions. It is grantee! that there is intelligence in 
nature; it is granted that there is conscious intelligence in man, and that 
this conscious intelligence is higher than that which is unconscious. We 
claim that it is more rational to explain the lower by the higher, than it is 
to explain the higher by the lower — more rational to suppose that uncon- 
scious intelligence has derived its origin from conscious intelligence, than 
that the conscious has come from the unconscious. If nature has an 
intelligent cause, you are bound to get your ideas of the nature -of that 
cause, not from the lowest forms of intelligence you know, but from 
the highest — not from the animal, therefore, but from the man. In our own 
intelligent purpose we have the simplest explanation of the intelligence of 
the universe about us. Somewhere or other you must find purpose outside 
of man to explain purpose in man — and when you have found a conscious 
intelligence that can explain man, you can best explain the unconscious 
universe by referring that to this intelligence also. An organism working 
unconsciously toward an end can be best explained by supposing that it is 
impelled toward that end by another being who is conscious and who has 
chosen the end. It is only reason to suppose that nature reaches her ends 
because nature is ruled by .a being immanent in nature whose intelligence 
has determined the ends and .whose power realizes them. Leave out man 
and the universe cannot be rationally interpreted. Include man in your 
survey, and ypu are bound to regard nature as the product and working of 
a mind and will analogous to the conscious soul that inhabits and energizes 
and directs the human body. 

I have said that, if we include man in our survey of the universe, we are 
bound to regard nature as the product and working of a mind and will anal- 
ogous to the conscious soul that inhabits and energizes and directs the human 
body. Deny this, and I do not see what is to save you from denying also 
"the fact of conscious intelligence in man. To this the theory I am combat- 
ing logically tends. We have no physical evidence of the existence of con- 
sciousness in others. As our fellow-beings are declared destitute of free 
volition, so they should be declared destitute of consciousness. As the 
brutes are called automata, so should man be called an automaton. It has 
well been said that if physics be all, we have no God, but then also we have 
no man, existing. If we deny that the adaptations in nature are indications 
of a designing God, we should equally deny that the watch, the aqueduct and 
the railway are indications of a designing man. "The essential bestiality 
of man" is a natural and logical conclusion. Into this Slough of Despond, 
this renunciation of the highest honors of manhood, the philosophy of the 
day is drifting. "What the bearing of the automatic theory of human 
nature," I quote from a late essay of Mr. Goldwin Smith, "what the bear- 
ing of the automatic theory of human nature would be upon the hopes and 



28 SCIENCE AND BELIGIOB. 

aspirations of man, or ou moral philosophy generally, It m>ght be difficult, 
no doubt, to say. But has any one of the distinguished advocates of the 
automatic theory ever acted upon it, or allowed his thoughts to be really 
ruled by it, for a moment? What can be imagined more strange than an 
automaton suddenly becoming conscious of its own automatic character, 
reasoning and debating about it automatically, and coming automatically to 
the conclusion that the automatic theory of itself is true?" 

Tennyson answers, in effect, the question of Goldwin Smith, and the 
auswer is despair and suicide: 

" Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of pain, 
If every man die forever, if all his griefs are in vain. 
And the homeless planet at length will be wheel'd thro' the silence of 

space. 
Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race, 
When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its last brother-worm 

will have fled 
From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth that is 

dead? 

" Have I crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? O yes. 
For these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press. 
When the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls are whooping at noon. 
And Doubt is the lord of this dunghill and crows to the sun and the nio^n. 
Till the Sun and the Moon of our science are both of them turu'd Into 

blood, 
And Hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow of good." 

And so we feel bound to protest against the doctrine that the unconscious Is 
the measure and the source of the conscious, and that final causes are only 
unphilosophic dreams. Mr. Darwin himself has conceded that upon his 
view there is no reason why the progress of life upon the planet should be 
toward higher rather than toward lower forms. Upon this theory there is 
no explanation of the moral order and sanctions of the individual life, nor 
of the moral purpose that is visible in human history. Evolution Itself, as 
involving uniform progress, implies an ordaining wisdom. Evolution, indeed 
is only a mode of divine action, not in conflict with design, but a new illus- 
tration of it. — a method of securing a result, and so the latest and best proof 
of a designing God. 

When once we have settled the truth that nature is to be interpreted by 
our knowledge of mind, and not mind by our knowledge of nature, we have 
the intellectual foundation of all true religion. Mind, and not matter, pre- 
sents to us the truest image of God. The universe is governed not by physi- 
cal so much as by moral laws. Final causes precede eflBcient causes. There 
is an end which controls the choice of means. Now we are prepared to see 
the marks of design which meet the candid eye everywhere in the universe. 
Now we can see eternal wisdom in every leaf and twig, in every sand-grain, 
in every breeze, in every sunbeam. No longer do we look upon the system 
of things as a ship constructed and launched by its builder and now given 
over to the sailors to navigate. No longer do we feel compelled to banish 
the great Architect to some far-off corner of his dominions, while the vasr 
structure of the world is left to itself, and the races of men pursue their 
fated course to glory or ruin. Rather than hear the terrible burden of Mich 
a godless universe. 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 29 

— "I'd rather be 
A Pagan, .suckled in a creed outworn ; 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Ilave glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

But better than Paganism is the faith to which a true science leads us. It 
teaches us that "the universe," in the words of a French philosopher, "is 
a thought of God." It teaches us that the living presence of God is all 
around us, and that in the great events of history, as well as in the changes 
of the natural world, there is a wisdom that sees the end from the beginning, 
and orders all things with reference to that "one far-off divine event, toward 
which the whole creation moves." In one of his hasty dispatches from the 
Geld of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington wrote: "The finger of Providence 
was upon me!" And there are moments at least in the lives of all of us, 
when we turn from the iron pressure of the world's unvarying laws with a 
burden upon us. The gigantic mechanism of the universe cannot soothe 
or quiet the questionings of the intellect or the agitations of the soul. 
Trouble and care, the responsibilities and failures of life, make us long to 
feel that some great divine Heart is at the centre of the sublime system, and 
that infinite Wisdom and Power can sympathize with us and give us rest. 
Then it is pleasant to see how nature, interpreted by that which we find 
within ourselves, gives us assurances of a divine and fatherly care. Pro- 
fessor Cooke, of Cambridge, has drawn a most ingenious and convincing 
argument from the nature and adaptation of the chemical elements of which 
the physical universe is composed. Grant that the world is merely the result 
of development from a nebulous fire-mist, revolving and condensing and 
throwing off red hot satellites and suns, — still the chemical constituents of 
that fire-mist — oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and all the elementary 
substances — existed then as now, and the evidences of design in their original 
adaptation to each other are as strong as the evidences of design in the com- 
pleted creation. God's goodness and wisdom alone can account for even 
this original constitution of the elements as they existed in chaos. But 
when we look up to the heavens above us, and see what mighty forces are 
required to cover a continent with its wintry mantle of snow, and to send 
the showers of the skies upon the just and unjust, — when we look beyond 
our atmosphere, and consider what vast powers of gravitation must be ever 
active to keep our planet in its true relations to the solar system and the 
stellar worlds above, we feel that the presence of God must be as inseparable 
from the movements of the universe as the figure of Phidias on Minerva's 
shield, which could not be erased without spoiling the whole composi- 
tion. And if this be the true conception of nature, then how rational it 
is to go further and say that this personal Will that moves all and preserves 
all, is not fettered by nature, but is the master of nature. Nature is but the 
manifestation of God, and the laws of nature are only the fixed methods of 
His working. He orders and governs the universe, not for its own sake, but 
for the revelation of Himself. Reason, love, conscience, purity, these are 
the ends for which we live, — they must be the ends for which God lives. 
And if we can accomplish our designs, by forming new combinations of 
natural laws and inserting among them the force of our own personal wills, 



30 SGIENCE AND RELIGION. 

how elastic and pliable must this constitution of things be lu the hand of 
God ! Miracles are not impossible unless God is impossible, — they are not 
improbable unless we deny his moral attributes. — they are not false unless 
we deny his word, and put beneath our feet all the laws of human testimony. 
Allow only a sufficient end to be gained by their performance — the authenti- 
cation of that very revelation which nature makes only imperfectly — and 
miracles become not only possible but natural. It was fit that the great bell 
of the universe should sound, when the Author of nature came in human 
guise to proclaim deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the 
blind. 

As you go out then, graduates of this college, into the great suffering 
world, to be ministers of mercy to the sick and dying, I would charge you 
to be something more than devotees of your profession, something more than 
men of science, — I would have you also men of faith. For faith is nothing 
more than the acceptance of God's testimony on evidence as accessible and 
as valid as that on which we accept the reality of outward phenomena. Such 
faith is no infirmity of the soul; on the other hand, it confers the only title 
to true symmetry and strength of character, as well as to the broadest and 
highest attainments in knowledge. Let intellect and heart go together, let 
physical and moral science be united, let knowledge and religion both com- 
bine to make character strong and success sure. What God hath joined 
together, let no man put asunder. Mere intellectual culture is only a part 
of the great sum of a perfect manhood. 

" What is she, cut from love and faith, 
But some wild E'allas from the brain 

" Of demons? fiery hot to burst 

All barriers in her onward race 
For power. Let her know her place: 
She is the second, not the first. 

" A higher hand must make her mild. 
If all be not in vain ; and guide 
Her footsteps, moving side by side 
With wisdom, like the younger child { 

•' For she is earthly, of the mind, 

But wisdom heavenly, of the soul/* 



m. 

MATEKIALISTIC SKEPTICISM; 



The unbelief of the present day is a stream with many eddies, but its 
general drift and direction are plain. Twenty years ago, the transcendental 
idealism of Hegel threatened to sweep away the faith of the world. By 
a natural and perfectly explicable reaction, this has given place to the 
mechanical philosophy of Feuerbach and Biichner. Or to put it more 
accurately the change from Hegel to Biichner in Germany is but the type 
of a universal change in the tendency of skeptical thought. It needs no 
long search to discover occasions and helpers of this change. The growth 
of material interests in these modern days, the progress of physical research, 
the inventions that have opened new mines to industry and new lands to 
trade, have disposed the unreligious to a Sadduceeism which holds this 
world to be all, and believes in neither angel nor spirit. 

Mot that materialism is always openly avowed. It constitutes the staple 
of thought in many a professed description of physical facts, and in many a 
literary work whose apparent aim is simply to depict life and the develop- 
ment of character. The philosophy of Comte and Bain and Herbert Spencer, 
the natural researches of Darwin and Tyndall and Huxley, the historical 
studies of Buckle and Taine, and the romances of Auerbach and George 
Bliot, alike, though in different degrees, reveal this materialistic spirit and 
show how widely diffused and how dangerous it is. It not only gives color 
to a large part of the Literature of the day, but it too often tinges the think- 
ing of medical men, and enters as an unconscious element into demands for 
radical reform in our methods of education. It gets possession even of 
philanthropists and theologians, leading the latter to make out of Providence 
and Redemption only one vast system of natural law, and leading the former 
to confound evangelization with civilization, and to deny the possibility of 
permanently changing, except by physical means, the innate and persistent 
types of character in either individuals or nations. 

It is this general tendency of modern literature and life which Christianity 
must now meet and, if possible, correct. The danger is great only so long 
as it is undefined. We may define the danger, by defining the system 
which gives rise to it. Materialism is that method of thought which would 
make all things, even intelligence and volition, to be mere phenomena of 
matter. It holds that the universe can be explained without bringing in 
the notion of a designing mind — without bringing in the notion of any 
immaterial principle at all — explained from the mere natural properties of 



Printed in the Examiner, October 2, 1S73. 
31 



32 MATERIALISTIC SKEPTICISM. 

the atoms and forces which constitute it. Stripped of the hazy rhetoric 
in which it is so Frequently enveloped, and reduced to a bare definition, 
materialism loses its novelty as well as its beauty. We descry in it the 
features of an error long since slain and buried. Five hundred years before 
Christ it was propounded by Democritus, and two centuries later all its 
essential principles were elaborately set forth in that Epicurean philosophy 
which the great apostle met and overthrew on Mars Hill. 

What a history this theory of the universe has had ! Rising evermore in 
periods of national and social declension, it has been the product and the 
sign of spiritual and moral decay— an ignis fatuus which springs from 
death, and which lures to death. No nation in its sturdy youth has ever 
had any other than a spiritualistic philosophy. No age given over to mate- 
rialism has ever shown creative genius or noble statesmanship. Epicurus 
marks the time of Greek corruption and debasement, when the deepening 
darkness was making negative preparation for the rise of Christ's new light 
upon the world. Condillac and Diderot, D'Alembert and D'Holbach, 
repeating the Epicurean philosophy in the 18th century, mark in like man- 
ner that time of godless passion and sensual idolatry which culminated in 
the French Revolution. 

But every prevalent and plausible falsehood has its grain of verity. Let 
us give materialism its rights, and allow the small truth which it contains, 
else we shall not understand it nor its power ; much less be able to frame a 
radical and conclusive answer. Materialism does right in insisting upon 
the substantive existence of the properties of matter and upon the persistence 
of natural forces. It utters a useful, though not the most successful, protest 
against the Idealism which would deny the objective existence of the exter- 
nal world, and the semi-pantheism which would make all force to be the 
simple volition of God. Let us acknowledge, then, once for all, the existence 
and the powers of matter — these we cannot deny without denying our senses 
and intuitions alike. The universe is not a drama whose shifting scenes 
display only one actor — God ; other powers have been ordained and other 
agents created by him ; there are physical powers as well as mental, blind 
forces as well as intelligent; and the observer of nature, as he looks upon 
the complicated movements and relations of elements and worlds, need never 
for a moment fancy them a deceptive show — they are a sublime reality. 
But then they are not the sublimest of realities. It is the fundamental error 
of materialism to think them so. To the view of a true philosophy, there 
lies back of all these a superior energy, an originating cause, a designing 
intelligence, an upholding power, whose greatness and wisdom they dimly 
reflect, but can never fully express ; in other words, the existence and 
working of the material elements is not an ultimate fact which furnishes its 
own explanation ; much less can this explain the higher forms of life which 
appear upon the planet; reason can never be satisfied without postulating 
an immaterial existence and a personal power in which these inhere, and 
from which they derive their being — an existence and a power infinitely 
higher, yet analogous in nature to that which we find in our own minds and 
wills — the existence and the power which we call God. 

Materialism may be refuted by considerations drawn from three different 
sources, the facts of matter, the facts of organization, the facts of mind. 



materialistic skepticism. 33 

Let us look at these in their order. First, then, matter furnishes no proper 
cause for the universe or for any of its phenomena. Think for a moment 
what is meant by cause. The cause of any given phenomenon is not simply 
the antecedent of that phenomenon. Tne night is the antecedent of the 
lay, but darkness is not the cause of light. Nothing is properly a cause 
Which has not power as well as antecedence. Reason is not satisfied without 
attributing every known change in nature to some power wnich produced it. 
The materialist cannot justify his position unless he can show that his 
philosophy accounts for the existence of the universe. He, with us, is 
compelled to assign some origin aud source to external things, but he finds 
that origin and source of all things in matter. We urge against this theory 
of the universe that the materialist is bound to furnish not simply a cause. 
but a sufficient cause, for this complicated mechanism and structure which 
we see without us. Matter is no such sufficient cause for the universe. For 
what is matter? This we may certainly say, that apart from its sensible 
qualities and from force, we know it only as existence', extension, perma- 
nence. It is plain then that matter, as matter, cannot be shown to have the 
properties of a cause. Only as some power from without shall possess it 
aud use it, can it become a cause, — and then not matter, but this power from 
without, is properly the cause in question. 

But the later materialism adds to the notion of matter the notion of force. 
This force is conceived, of course, as a mere property of matter, since to 
make it a separate and independent existence would be, for the materialist, 
to give up the theory of matter as a cause, and to make shipwreck of his 
materialism altogether. But can force be, as the materialist holds, only an 
inseparable property of matter? It is sufficient to say that the fact of inertia 
disproves this. No body ever moves of itself. It remains in a state of rest 
forever until impressed from without. We do not, indeed, know the nature 
of gravitation. Newton conceived of it as an impulsion at) extra. But 
whether it be what Newton imagined, or an attraction of every molecule 
from within, the case is not altered — we get no nearer to an inherent power 
of motion. Only as one portion of matter is acted upon by another, can it 
move toward that other. The motion of matter is due, not to matter itself, 
but to some external cause. In other words, adding to matter the idea of 
force, does not render matter a sufficient cause for the least motion in the 
universe, much less a sufficient cause for the universe itself. The motions 
of matter, and the adjustments of material bodies to each other, so that they 
draw forth each other's powers and work together harmoniously toward 
useful ends, can only be accounted for by supposing an immaterial force — 
a force which is itself no property of matter. 

This force must be a mental force. And that, because we find ideas in 
nature, and ideas are the product solely of mind. Why is the spoken word 
significant to men? Why is it different from the whistling of the wind? 
Simply because, from the analogy of our own speech, we infer that it has a 
cause in the mind of another. Vibrations of air do not explain it, because 
it contains an idea. We cannot explain a beautiful picture by making an 
inventory of the colors of the canvas. We see an idea in it. We see a mind 
behind it that once conceived and expressed that idea. So to a right-think- 
j:g soul the universe is a spoken word, a harmonious picture. The material 



34 MATERIALISTIC SKEPTICISM. 

elements of which it is composed do not explain it; something more than 
matter is there; there is mind, and the universe is the expression of that 
mind. Or, to sum up in few words this portion of the argument : Since 
matter is neither self -existent nor self-acting, whether in the molecule or 
the world, it can never be regarded as a sufficient cause or explanation of 
the present system of things; supplementing the idea of matter with that 
of force does not help the difficulty, since whatever force is inseparable from 
matter still leaves each portion of matter inert and dependent upon impres- 
sions from without ; to attribute to this force the properties of a first cause 
is to make it a force apart from matter and above matter, and such a force 
can never be conceived as other than the energy of a conscious spirit, a 
spirit that can create matter and work upon matter, but which has no nec- 
essary connection with matter, and which the facts of matter can never 
explain. In short, the facts of matter show that matter can never explain 
its own existence or adjustments; they show the rather, that it evermore 
points upward to a 'causative and mighty Mind. 

A second argument against materialism is derived from what we may call 
facts of organization. There are phenomena of organic life which can never 
be explained except upon the hypothesis of an organizing force superior to 
matter. Assimilation and reproduction, growth according to definite plan, 
preservation of form notwithstanding changes of substance, capacity of self- 
repair, these characteristics of plant and animal life are in themselves a 
reversal of all laws belonging to matter as such, whether those laws be 
mechanical or chemical. Effects so special and peculiar demand a special 
and peculiar cause — and this cause we denominate life. It has indeed been 
sought to define life as a mere quality of matter. But if life were a property 
of protoplasm, as aquosity is a property of water, protoplasm and life would 
be inseparable. We know, however, that in the dead animal protoplasm 
may exist without life. The mutton which the materialist eats might con- 
vince him of his error, for here is protoplasm of which life is not a property. 
On the other hand, the living protoplasm has a structure and power whica 
chemistry cannot account for, any more than it can account for the peculiar 
build and the marvelous achievements of a printing-press or a reaping- 
machine. To account for this structure and this power we must presuppose 
not only chemical and mechanical forces, but also a force utterly different in 
its nature, and as superior to these forces as its results are superior to theirs. 
The force that dominates matter and subdues it to its purposes must be, 
not a material, but an immaterial energy. 

And here again we meet the ever-recurring fact of ideas in nature. The 
life of the animal and of the plant reveals a rational unity, a tending of all 
its forces to an end, a working out of a plan, a striving for completeness of 
organization and use. And as in the life of the individual plant or animal, 
so in the long history of life upon the earth since the geologic ages began, 
we discover a unity and harmony which reason refuses to attribute to the 
blind action of natural forces. The stream cannot rise higher than the foun- 
tain. The system whose order so delights the reason must have had for its 
source a designing intelligence; in other words, must have sprung not from 
matter but from mind. Even if the materialist could by his chemistry act- 
ually produce living plants or animals from inorganic materials, the argu- 



MATERIALISTIC SKEPTICISM. 35 

men! we urge Would not be invalidated, since the production of such forma 
ol' life as geologic history displays, and their production in such order and 
relations, demands still a designing and adjusting mind that adapts the ele- 
ments to each other, and prearranges the course of their development. 

But this origin of life from inorganic elements is a pure assumption of 
which science knows nothing at all. No single attested fact as yet substan- 
tiates it. So far as we know, life originates only from preexisting life. It 
is never the result of organization, but always the cause of organization; 
never the product of protoplasm, but always something superinduced upon 
it. You may look in vain to mere nature for its parentage. Go back a 
thousand million years, and matter can furnish the source and explanation 
of it no more than now. You must either attribute its existence on the 
globe to some meteoric accession from other planets of the system — and this 
merely pushes back the problem without solving it, — or you must acknowl- 
edge that life sprang originally from an immaterial source, from one who 
has life in himself — and that is the same thing as to say that materialism is 
false, since the fundamental superior originating thing in this universe is 
not matter, but Mind. 

Materialism is disproved, finally, by the facts of our own being. Our intel- 
lectual nature gives testimony against it. For there is much in this intellect- 
ual nature which never could have come from matter. The materialist holds 
that mental energy is only one of the correlated physical forces, and that 
thought is but transformed sensation. We might answer that it is essential 
to the very idea of physical force to be susceptible of measurement by physic- 
al tests. Heat is a mode of motion, say the scientists, and therefore the 
force expended in any given combustion may be expressed in actual pounds- 
weight. But who shall weigh thought or feeling or volition? Love cannot 
be measured by bushels, or weight of thought estimated in avoirdupois. But 
wherein consists the absurdity of this, if mental action is but the product of 
impressions from without? 

The fundamental error in this materialistic reasoning is that of supposing 
the mind to be a mere tablet on which circumstances and sensations make 
their marks, whereas the mind is active instead, in all its knowledge, and 
gives quite as much as it receives. The single fact of attention shows this. 
It depends wholly upon the consent of the will whether we receive impres- 
sions from passing objects or not. A man may have flowing into his ears all 
the noises of a crowded street, and yet be as unconscious of them as if he 
were in silence and solitude. Into what sort of mental energy are all these 
multitudinous sensations transformed? Or if we ask, with a late writer, into 
what physical force the brain power of the dying Shakespeare was converted, 
what answer can be returned? The truth is, it is impossible to account for 
the power of thinking by any combinations or vibrations of material atoms. 
Thought may in the present state be connected inseparably with such affec- 
tions of our physical organism — although even this is exceedingly difficult 
to prove — but # this connection is not identity. Because the organist pro- 
duces the fugues of Bach only by touching the keys of his instrument, we 
do not conclude that instrument and organist are one, and that that one is 
the organ. Thought and the motions of matter are not mutually convertible. 
We may not only say with Tyndall that "the passage from the physics of the 



MATERIALISTIC SKEPTICISM. 

brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable," but we may 
also say that to derive the latter from the former is a reversal of all logic 

If the physical could he proved to produce the psychical, the materialist 
would have proved his doctrine. But the latter produces the former as much 
as the former the latter. In order to sense impressions there must previously 
exist a mind to be impressed. As Professor Gardiner has said: "Most of 
the properties of matter have no meaning where there is no mind to perceive 
them. There is no audible world without the ear ; there is no visible world 
without the eye. What is accessible to the senses is not the only reality. 
Mind gives to matter its chief meaning. Hence that matter alone can never 
explain the universe." And Robert Browning, that "subtlest assertor of 
the soul in song." says nothing more worthy of himself than when, in "The 
Ring and the Book," he puts into the Pope's mouth the words: "Mind is 
not matter, nor from matter, but above." 

We are asking whether mind is a sublimated form of matter? What does 
the mind itself say with regard to this question? This simply, that it is 
radically and essentially different from matter. Amid all the changes of the 
material world around it, and amid all the changes of the material organism 
of which it makes use, the mind is conscious to itself of being one continu- 
ous and identical existence. In and with every act of sense-perception is 
bound up the mind's knowledge of itself as an undivided unit, inconceivable 
as occupying space or as measurable by any material standard. While the 
mind is conscious of dependence upon the senses for knowledge of the outer 
world, a large part of its knowledge, and that the noblest part, is its own 
original and native endowment. The ideas of substance, of space and time 
of cause, of right, of God, are not the gift or product of experience. Experi- 
ence may occasion their rise in consciousness, but there is more in them than 
experience can ever explain. And as with its knowledge, so with its higher 
activities — these are independent of any known physical conditions. No 
materialist has ever yet shown that the abstract thought of any great philos- 
opher or the fervid imaginings of any great poet could be accounted for by 
changes of molecules in the brain. There is such a thing as an originating 
activity in the human spirit. Affections of the mind, such # as love, hope, 
fear, influence the body more than the sensations of the body influence the 
mind. The mind knows itself as superior to the body — not its creature and 
slave. It can resist the body and subdue it. Instead of ceasing to grow 
when the body ceases to grow, the mind only then enters upon its noblest 
growth. Instead of becoming weak and helpless as the body fails in strength, 
the mind not seldom shows then an unflagging brilliance and energy. And 
when the frail body is near to dissolution, the mind feels most its immeasur- 
able superiority to all material things, and triumphs in the very article of 
death. The materialism that would degrade man to a cadaver finds all the 
voices of our intellectual being uniting in one solemn protest against it. 

But the protest grows more loud and plain when we consult the moral 
nature. If we know anything at all, we know that we are free. We know 
that we have the power to originate action, and to choose between right and 
wrong. But matter is incapable of originating action. Upon the material- 
istic theory, free will is impossible. The materialist is a necessitarian. 
Huxley shows us the logical outcome of the theory, when he declares that a 



MATERIALISTIC SKEPTICISM. 37 

spontaneous act is an absurdity, since it is an effect without a cause. But 
mark the result. If the human will be not a cause, then it belongs in the 
category of things determined wholly from without. Human responsibility 
ceases, and with this all just foundation for law and morality. Conscience 
is at once annihilated, for if conscience be a modification of matter, then it 
is mechanical, not moral, and this is the same as to say that it does not exist. 
What yet remains of remorse and apprehension in the mind of the trans- 
gressor is but a subjective delusion, having no objective rule in the universe 
of things to justify it. and no future account to render its decisions worthy 
of the slightest regard. Man is what his nature and his circumstances make 
him. He may resolve and pray as he will, but the forces of the universe are 
persistent and they overmaster him. We may look with sympathy upon 
men laden with tendencies to evil, but there is no power to recreate and save 
— that is, no power except the distant and slow-working forces of inheritance 
climate, and social condition. Why labor for the welfare of creatures of 
clay, over whose perished bodies "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" will soon 
be said, but all hope of resurrection be wanting? James Martineau, in the 
autobiographical preface to his "Types of Ethical Theory," expresses not 
only his own experience but the experience of many others, when he says: 
"It was the Irresistible pleading of the moral consciousness which first drove 
me to rebel against the limits of the merely scientific conception. It became 
incredible to me that nothing was possible except the actual. * * * Is 
there then no ought to be, other than what ist" 

Materialism gives up and must give up the immortality of the soul as an 
egoistic reverie, since the mind must die with the body whose movements 
constitute it. It is said of Robert Hall, that he buried his materialism in his 
father's grave. As he looked into the gulf that was just about to swallow up 
forever all that was left to him of that wise mind and tender father's heart, 
the son shrank back. He felt that the tomb was too narrow to contain so 
much. He felt that whatever might become of the body, the soul was fash- 
ioned in a different mould and must live on forever. But the highest hope 
of the materialist, as he lays mother or child in the dust, is that the body 
may manure the soil and pass through endless changes into other forms of 
conscious or unconscious life. And we little realize how much of this pagan- 
ism is abroad to-day. The same hopeless spirt of Epicurean fatalism which 
breathed through all the later age of imperial and decadent Rome is breath- 
ing in much of our literature to-day. It finds its fit expression in the maxim 
of Feuerbach : "Han ist was er iszt — Man is what he eats." Expressed 
or unexpressed, visible or invisible, it is the subtle spirit of materialism, 
which declares the human body to be only a weedy outgrowth of the primeval 
slime, the soul to be only a congeries of highly developed and subtly con- 
nected atoms, and immortality to be only the eternal procession of the body's 
disintegrated elements around the great circle of chemical change. Such a 
view as this inevitably reduces philosophy to physiology, ethics to mechan- 
ics, and the law of God to a bill of fare. 

Does it need to be said that, logically, this is Atheism also? Can there be 
no such thing as spontaneity? Then there is no freedom for God any more 
than for man. Must we deny the existence of everything which we cannot 
weigh in scales and handle with the forceps? Then we must not only grant 
to the materialist that there is no such thing as mind, because, forsooth, the 



tS MATERIALISTIC SKEPTICISM. 

anatomist cannot lay it bare to sight with his cerebral dissecting knife — we 
must also grant that there can be no such tiling as God, because, forsooth, 
the astronomer cannot see God through his telescope. May we not say of 
materialism, as a final and conclusive indictment, that the facts of our reli- 
gious nature disprove it? We have in us and with us, as our inmost posses- 
sion, the knowledge of God. Try to escape it as we may, it underlies all our 
reasoning and conditions all our life. In times of awakened conscience, 
when the tempest rages, or death draws nigh, this inward witness to God's 
existence and moral character stands out like the handwriting of fire on 
Belshazzar's palace-walls. To this God our very nature compels us, in spite 
of ourselves, to look, as the proper rule and end of life, the true rest and 
portion and reward of a human soul. Materialism, by depriving us of God, 
would deprive us of all that can make the present tolerable, or the future 
other than an object of terror. If all things in the universe be only phenom- 
ena of matter, then not only is there no spirit in man, but the idea of a 
supreme Spirit in the universe is the wildest of imaginations. All worship 
or upward looking of the soul is foreclosed forever. The heavens are deaf 
to human entreaty. In man's sin and sorrow there is no eye to pity and no 
arm to save. The highest wisdom is to live upon the maxim, "Let us eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die." 

" I trust I have not wasted breath : 
I think we are not wholly brain. 
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain. 
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death ; 

" Not only cunning casts in clay: 

Let Science prove we are, and then 
What matters Science unto men, 
At least to me? I would not stay." 

Thus we see how a whole system of thought, originating in a desire after 
scientific unity, becomes dogmatic and thoroughly unscientific, by attempt- 
ing to refer two classes of phenomena to the same ground, when it cannot 
logically resolve one into the other. To honor matter by denying mind is 
to falsify the facts. To elevate God's ordinance of second causes into the 
chief place, and make them play the part of the Great First Cause, is logi- 
cally suicide, since in denying the fundamental and superior fact of spiritual 
existence man logically denies his own existence, and opens the way to 
utter skepticism. 

And yet the logical refutation of materialism is not the only one, nor the 
most practical. A better refutation is the sense of sin in the soul, inexplic- 
able except there be freedom and God. A better still is the person of 
Christ, inexplicable except it be a new breaking in upon the sinful history 
of the world by the power and grace of Him who first created it. He who 
well ponders his own nature and his own lack of harmony with the moral 
law revealed in conscience, will see depths in his own being which a material 
theory of its origin can never explain, and svhich only Christ, the Son of 
God, the all-sufficient Saviour, can ever fill with light and peace. To Christ 
then we commend the candid inquirer. Let him go to Christ, to Christ him- 
self, and be "taught in him, even as truth is in Jesus." lie who is "able to 
save even unto the uttermost," will save him. even from these uttermost 
depths of materialistic skepticism. 



IV. 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION.* 



I count It an honor to speak to these hearers and In this place. Those 
whom I immediately address are preparing to influence their time by the 
force of ideas. The place is hospitable to ideas, — the world's thought, 
whether new or old, finds a focus here. Protectionists did wisely in their 
generation when they sought to stem the rising tide of free trade by securing 
the colleges. But it is not so much for its services to science that I value 
the University. It is because every University is a well-spring of philosophy 
— a teacher of those fundamental principles which underlie all science, as 
well as all literature, jurisprudence, morals and civilization. Therefore, I 
feel the responsibility as well as the honor of speaking here. And I can 
best discharge this responsibility, as it seems to me, by directing your 
attention to a new philosophy, which makes imposing claims upon our 
allegiance, which is the current sensation of the decade, and which, if 
accepted, must work great ultimate changes, whether for good or evil, 
in our methods of thought and life. I propose to you a consideration of 
what, in America, has been called the Cosmic Philosophy, or what is more 
generally known as the Philosophy of Evolution. 

I speak of this philosophy as the intellectual sensation of the decade, for 
not ten years have passed since it made its way to the front. It is not wise 
to be moved from our critical attitude by the flourish of its trumpets and 
the seeming weight of its onset. The student of philosophy knows that 
each decade has its new pretender to the throne of thought. "Our little 
systems have their day. They have their day and cease to be." Old men 
among us look back to the time when the reigning philosophy was that of 
Locke and Hume. The men of middle-age before me remember how that 
philosophy was attacked and seemingly overthrown by the transcendental 
idealism of Germany, and how this last became, in turn, the bugbear of 
orthodox thinkers. We of a younger sort know well that the ghost of 
transcendentalism has been laid these many years. In its place we have 
seen rise upon the scene the portentous form of French positivism with its 
contemptuous denial of causation, and beyond the Rhine the accompanying 
gross materialism of Biichner, who, like a revived Lucretius, deifies blind 
atoms. And now that positivism has lost its prestige and power, it is only 
natural that the generation just entering upon active life should see still 
another claimant to the honors of the field. It is the scheme which we 
examine to-night. At first glance the new system seems better armed and 



* An address delivered before the Literary Societies of Colby University, 
Tuesday evening, July 23, 1878. 

39 



40 THE PIIILOSOrilY OF EVOLUTION. 

equipped than any of those which it has superseded. But closer inspection 
reveals the fact that this equipment is largely made up of spoils taken from 
these very predecessors. In truth, the new philosophy is an attempt to 
combine the plausible elements of all the four systems that have gone before ; 
or, in other words, to rehabilitate the sensational method of Locke and 
Hume in certain discarded robes of the later idealism, while positivism 
furnishes the facts and materialism the spirit of the whole. 

Yet we would not willingly underrate our opponent. Under the con- 
structive hand of Herbert Spencer, this philosophy has a sweep that com- 
prehends the universe. Resources of advanced physical science, such as 
Locke and Hume never kuew, are marshaled in its defense. And to these 
Mr. Spencer adds a faculty of popular exposition such as no preceding 
thinker of his ability has possessed. When we grant that he has brought 
out into strong relief, though he has not discovered, a certain truth of 
development too much ignored before, we allow to his system certain notable 
elements of power. But all this is so much the worse if the system, in its 
essential features, is false. This we desire to show, both as respects the 
assumptions upon which it proceeds, and as respects the method in which 
its principles are applied. 

As Mr. Jevons has well shown, the Baconian method had its origin, not 
with Francis Bacon, Lord Yerulam, in the sixteenth century, but with Roger 
Bacon, friar and philosopher, in the thirteenth. This whole method was 
a recoil from that of the Greek philosophers which the scholastics had 
perpetuated. The Greek philosophers had assumed certain causes and then 
had inferred what the effects must be. Give them fire or air or water, and 
out of them they would construct the existing universe. The Baconian 
philosophy cast contempt upon all this and taught the world that the only 
true method of science was to proceed, not from causes to effects, but from 
effects to causes. First facts, then explanations; observation and induction, 
the instruments of knowledge ; progress ever from the known to the unknown 
— these were its fundamental principles ; and if human knowledge since 
that day has made progress such as the ancients never dreamed of, it has 
been because modern investigators have followed these principles in their 
labors. Now, the first count in our indictment of the philosophy of Evolu- 
tion is this, that it ignores this settled organon of investigation and attempts 
to deduce the existing universe by purely necessary laws from an assumed 
original somewhat, the existence and nature of which is undemonstrated and 
indemonstrable. That the deductive element, rather than the inductive, is 
the determining characteristic of the scheme is an ofTense against modern 
science, and raises a presumption against it at the start. When Mr. Spencer 
tells us that if we will grant him the single indubitable truth of the persist- 
ence of force, he will show us how nebulae and suns and planets and rocks 
and plants and brutes and men and histories and civilizations and literatures 
and philosophies have been necessarily evolved, we seem to be hearing 
Anaximander over again as he tells us that all things come from infinity — 
a principle universally diffused and devoid of all qualities which can be 
described or known, and which is to all intents and purposes equivalent to 
nothing, endowed with the power of generation, and we turn with relief to 
the words of Tait. a greater scientific authority than Spencer, when he says : 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 41 

"No a priori reasoning can conduct us demonstrably to a single physical 
truth." 

I must not be understoftd as objecting to the Cosmic Philosophy, so called, 
simply upon the ground that it makes use of an a priori principle, for all 
systems whatever are obliged to take for granted certain a priori principles; 
indeed, without assuming the existence of space and time, the necessity of 
a cause for every change, and the validity of the common laws of thought, 
we could not observe or reason at all. What I have thus far objected to is 
this, that the Cosmic Philosophy, instead of using its abstract fundamental 
principle as purely regulative, commits the scientific enormity of deriving 
the whole concrete universe therefrom. This reasoning from the abstract 
to the concrete, instead of depending for knowledge of the concrete upon 
observation and induction, constitutes it a purely a priori scheme of the 
most vicious kind. Mr. Spencer's method would be a wrong one and its 
results delusive, even if the fundamental principle from which he deduces 
his scheme were true. But I urge against it a still more important objec- 
tion : this fundamental principle is not simply undemonstrated and inde- 
monstrable ; it is false — false by defect. Add what is necessary to make it 
true, and no such system of evolution can be based upon it. We are asked 
to postulate at the beginning simple force, abstract and blind, and the 
necessity of its persistence. Now we grant the mental necessity that compels 
this assumption, provided only we be allowed to state the full content of 
our belief. That belief, fully expressed, is nothing less than this : There 
is an endlessly persistent will-force. For we know nothing of force at all, 
except through, and upon occasion of, the exercise of our own wills. In 
the outward world our senses perceive change, but they do not perceive 
power. I might look forever upon the sweep of the tempest and the rolling 
waves of the ocean without inferring that the tempest produced the waves, 
if it were not that I have within me the experience of effort and of effect 
produced by effort. I will to raise my arm and strike a blow. In that 
willing there is a direct consciousness of force and its outgoing. If my arm 
is in a normal condition, the arm is lifted and the external effect is produced 
— the hammer rings on the anvil ; but the stroke of the hammer is not force, 
and the muscular tension of the arm is not force; these are but indications 
and effects of force ; the anvil may fail to be struck, and the arm from 
sudden paralysis may fail to strike, but force may still exist and be con- 
sciously exerted back of all these, though it be exerted in vain. In short, 
we know force, not as something perceived by the senses, but as something 
intuitively cognized by the reason. We know it as the inseparable correlate 
of effort ; as always implying will ; in the very conception of force there 
lies, latent if not expressed, the idea of conative and active mind. We feel 
compelled, with Mr. Spencer, to postulate force as behind and before all 
things ; but then it is force that has its origin in will ; and if it be an end- 
less, universal and infinite force, then a force proceeding from an endless, 
universal and infinite mind. Force cannot be defined or conceived except in 
terms of will ; and if, as Mr. Spencer declares, our conviction of the persist- 
ence of force is "deeper than demonstration, deeper even than definite 
cognition, deep as the very nature of mind," then we demand that the 
fundamental principle of his philosophy, false by defect hitherto, be enlarged 



42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 

to take in the full compass of this intuitive deliverance of reason, and that 
he build bis system henceforth, if he can, upon the broader truth that, as 
the ultimate basis and explanation of all things, there exists and persists an 
infinite source of energy whose nature is conscious intelligence and wilL 

The central reason why he truncates this most fundamental of our knowl- 
edges until it becomes a torso without sign of life or reason will very soon 
appear. Let us at present notice the objection which he urges against 
regarding force as always implying an exercise of will. It is simply this, 
that upon this view we must consider the muscles of the arm not only, but all 
external things in nature, as having each its separate consciousness. When 
you lift a chair from the floor, he would say, you are bound upon your theory 
to maintain that the chair is as conscious of the force of gravitation which 
draws it down, as your arm is conscious of the nervous tension which holds 
it up. Not so, we say. Both the chair and the arm are middle terms, and 
neither are properly conscious. Both are the Instruments of force. The 
arm communicates and gives effect to a force which does not originate in the 
arm, and of which the arm is not itself conscious. It is the ego, the mind, 
that puts forth the force, and is conscious of the strain. So the chair com- 
municates and gives effect to a force which does not originate in the chair, 
and of which the chair is not conscious. But the mind and will, of which 
gravitation is the uniform expression, may be supposed to be conscious of 
each particular instance of its application, unless indeed we be authiopo- 
morphic enough to fancy an infinite mind as not sufficiently capacious to 
embrace such details without perplexity, and an infinite will as not suffi- 
ciently powerful to make such multiplied efforts without weariness. 

But the moment we perceive clearly that force is simply a manifestation 
of will, and has will for its inseparable correlate, we see at once that the 
persistence of force means the persistence of will. And will is necessarily 
free. Here then is an incalculable element, at the start, which threatens 
ruin to any theory of the universe that would explain it as a necessary devel- 
opment of blind forces existing from the beginning. We see at once how 
important it is for Mr. Spencer to exclude this will from his system. Admit 
it, and what trouble may it not work — to Mr. Spencer '. God is not so easily 
harnessed, and will not draw so steadily on the evolution -track, as will these 
perfectly calculable forces. But how is it that force has become force - 
moment ago we had the persistence of force, and the peculiarity of this 
force was that it was abstract, indefinite, intangible. Suddenly it has become 
forces, definite forces of attraction, and very inconsistently as it would seem, 
of repulsion also, and these wonderfully adapted to each other and to the 
production of matter and motion with the whole universe of things that 
result from them. Ah, there is but one explanation of it ! If forces had 
been talked of at the beginning, it would have been too plainly seen that 
they do not necessarily persist. Only the absolute force — which we have 
seen to be identical with, or correlative to, infinite mind and will — only this 
absolute force persists of necessity, while what we call forces are mere man- 
ions of this self -existent force, and may persist or not as the will in 
which they have their origin may direct. So Mr. Spencer gets the advan- 
tage, to his theory, of investing blind forces with the uni-Langeableness of 
tU; God whom they manifest, while yet the creative will and deslgniL. 



fHE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 43 

dom of God are set aside. There is a certain truth, indeed, in the doctrine 
that forces persist; but then it is a mere relative truth of induction, not an 
absolute truth of philosophy. How far it is true is to be determined, not 
from cur inner consciousness, but from observation and testimony. In all 
ordinary cases, and for all common purposes of life, the forces of nature are 
unchangeable: But no law of necessity ordains their uniformity. The will 
which they manifest to-day may abolish them to-morrow. It is only the 
infinite will which they manifest that necessarily persists. And that per- 
sists not necessarily in action external to itself. It might conceivably exist 
for whole eternities absorbed in thought and activity of which there should 
be no outward manifestation whatever. Infinite will need not manifest its 
whole power. God can all that he will, but he will not all that he can, — else 
God is the slave of his own omnipotence. He is a great God, and in that 
limitless mind and unfettered will which constitute the only necessarily per- 
sisting force, there are fortunately some things that are not dreamed of in 
Mr. Spencer's philosophy. 

Allowing, however, that force can exist, and can be differentiated into 
forces without implying will or design, we have still to see whether matter 
and motion can be derived from mere force. We maintain that this cannot 
be done without denying that matter is matter and that motion is motion. 
All we know of matter in the last analysis, it is said, is that it resists or that 
it presses. Boscovitch concluded that the only proper conception of matter 
was that which regarded it as consisting of mere centres of force. But how 
can there be pressure or resistance where there is nothing that presses or 
resists, and where there is nothing that is pressed or resisted? We see 
clearly that, unless we accept the purely idealistic hypothesis that nothing 
really exists but sensatious and impressions, we must affirm that over against 
the mind that has the sensations and impressions there exists an external 
matter that produces them. Impressions without something that impresses 
and something that is impressed, sensations without something that has sen- 
sation and something that causes sensations, are figments of the imagina- 
tion. In reality, we know the external thing perceived, and the conscious 
ego that perceives, in the same concrete act in which we cognize the internal 
fact of perception. We know the existence of external matter with the same 
certainty as we know our own existence. But a philosophy which resolves 
matter into mere force must make it a purely subjective thing, internal and 
not external to the mind. It must believe in impressions without anything 
to make them, and resistance without anything that resists, and this is the 
principle of absolute idealism. And this pitfall Mr. Spencer's philosophy 
cannot escape, except by being utterly inconsistent with itself and admitting 
a principle of realism which will destroy it. No, let us say it out so plainly 
that none can mistake, — matter is matter, and not the mere feeling of it. 
and if it be something really external to the mind, then neither force nor 
forces can account for it, and much less produce it. And yet without matter 
force has nothing to work with, and is unavailable for the purposes of evo- 
lution. Is it not easy to see that a Creator is required, before even Mr. 
Spencer's forces can build up a universe? When we perceive with Professor 
Cook, of Cambridge, that the elements, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, are 
wonderfully adapted to each other in their original constitution, and with 



44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 

Professor Clerk Maxwell, of England, that the indivisible atoms in their 
absolute uniformity bear all the [Barks of being "manufactured articles," 
can we not say that the theory of Creation is an infinitely simpler and more 
credible one than that of the chance development of matter from the action 
of loose forces in the empty vbid? But then, if matter was created, it may 
be destroyed, and what then will become of the great principle of the inde- 
structibility of matter which forms so natural a corollary to the persistence 
of force? Ah, that is Mr. Spencer's quandary, and not ours! To us who 
believe in creation, the indestructibility of matter is no a priori and neces- 
sary truth, as it seems to Mr. Spencer, but only a relative truth, the limits 
of which are to be determined by observation and experience. The same 
God who creates can also destroy. 

So with motion. This," too, is called a mere manifestation of force. But 
can we be sure that, even with force and matter on hand at the outset, 
continuous motion will necessarily follow? What is meant by inertia? Is 
it not this, that matter is not self-moving? Surely one portion of matter 
cannot move another portion without a previous adjustment of the one 
portion to the other. And so to the magnificent scheme of development 
suggested by Laplace- — development of the universe from a primeval tenuous 
mist of atoms, drawing together, and so revolving, and so heating, and so 
intensifying and liberating its latent forces until chaos turns to cosmos — we 
only reply that force alone cannot explain motion. Force may be only 
latent, or it may draw all matter to a common centre of blackness and death, 
or it may involve matter in boundless waste and confusion. If the universe 
consisted of a single atom, however richly endowed with force, it would 
nover move at all. As mattter is inexplicable without creation, so motion 
is inexplicable without adjustment. For the operation of force there is 
requisite, plurality of atoms and relation between them. And this relation 
can be constituted only by mind ; above all, motion that shall evolve 
anything is impossible without coordinating intelligence. That nebulous 
matter moved at all, and especially that it moved so as to produce, even 
after vast cycles of time, the order and beauty of suns and stars with their 
measured orbits and their mutual influences, this has its root in purpose 
and plan, not in mere force without prescience or wisdom. No cosmos is 
possible without a plan, and while we should have only praise for Mr. 
Spencer in this portion of his researches, if he were setting forth the method 
of divine working, we can feel only reprobation for a scheme which makes 
so large a place for matter and motion, but which has no place for mind. 

Thus far we have criticised only Mr. Spencer's general method and the 
particular a priori principles upon which his philosophy is founded. To 
follow him minutely in the practical application of these principles would 
be an almost endless task. Yet every system must be finally tested by its 
applications. Does it actually explain the facts? We maintain that Mr. 
Spencer's scheme not only does not account for the most critical and impor- 
tant of these facts, but is compelled either to ignore them or virtually to 
deny them. I shall try to show its defects in three important features: 1st, 
as an explanation of the origin of life and mind: 2dly, as a theory of human 
knowledge with regard to truth and God; and 3rdly, as a basis for scientific 
and practical morality. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. io 

1. You are aware that the Mosaic record recoguizes both creation and 
cosmogony. It recognizes the present order of things as the result, not 
simply of an originating fiat of God, but also of subsequent arrangement 
and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials subsequently to their 
creation is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the con- 
ditions of organized existence. Life is depicted as reproducing itself, after 
its introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner 
energy. The earth brings forth and the waters swarm ; the tree has seed 
in itself and the animal creation is self-multiplying. But although this 
principle of development is recognized in Genesis, as Origen and Augustine 
and Anselm perceived many centuries ago, yet it has not been allowed its 
full weight by the interpreters of Scripture. They have been so impressed 
with the unique declarations of God's absolute Creatorship that they have 
not sufficiently attended to the accompanying declarations of subsequent 
evolution according to natural law. It is this last principle whicb Mr. 
Sppncer has made the characteristic of his system ; but the principle is not 
only as old the church-fathers, — it is as old as M.iscs. We thank him 
for emphasizing a truth too much neglected. But we charge him with 
narrowness in excluding from his scheme the greater truth that in the 
beginning God created the heaveu and the earth. His philosophy demands 
this truth for its supplement and explanation, but, since it is a truth which 
could come only from revelation, he will none of it. How is it That the 
Hebrews alone of all nations had the idea of absolute creation? We find 
no trace of it in classic times. With the heathen, there were only eternal 
processes of birth or growth from something pre-existing, — the question as to 
origination none attempted to answer. Science could never have informed 
the Hebrews, for science was not. Physical science can observe changes, 
but it knows nothing of origins. As Sir Charles Lyell has well said : 
"Geology is the earth's autobiography — -but no autobiography can give 
account of the birth of its subject." But what science cannot give, reve- 
lation did give to that least scientific nation of ancient times. They knew 
of God, the Creator of the very substance of the universe. They knew of 
development, but they knew also of an originating act of God by which this 
development was prefaced, and of successive manifestations of divine power 
by which this development was supplemented. 

We are ourselves evolutionists then, within certain limits, and we accept 
a large portion of the results of Mr. Spencer's work. We gratefully appro- 
priate whatever science can prove. We have long ceased to respect the 
objection of Leibnitz to the Newtonian law of gravitation. We know that 
gravitation does not take the universe out of the hands of God, but only 
reveals the method of the divine working. So, the day is past, in our 
judgment, when thoughtful men can believe that there was a creative fiat of 
God at the introduction of every variety of vegetable and animal life. God 
may work by means, and a law of variation and of natural selection may 
have been and probably was the method in which his great design in the 
vast majority of living forms was carried out. But what we claim is that 
no law of mere evolution can furnish an exhaustive explanation of the facts. 
There are outstanding problems which this philosophy can never solve- 
The origin of life upon the earth — the beginning of organic existence, — 



46 TIIE PHILOSOrHY OF EVOLUTION. 

this is utterly beyond the powers of Mr. Spencer's calculus. For Bastiau's 
theory of spontaneous generation there is not a shadow of scientific warrant, 
and Sir William Thomson's method of bringing in a vegetable germ hidden 
in the cleft of some meteorite from the stellar spaces is too manifestly a 
shoving-back of the difficulty to some other sphere, where he cannot well 
be followed, to merit anything better than ridicule. Again, when we come 
to the origin of mind this philosophy is utterly at fault. It can show that 
psychical processes are always accompanied by physical processes, and that 
mind and body are mutually dependent in the present state of being; but it 
has never made an approach to proving that consciousness is transformed 
physical or nervous force, or that thought is a mode of motion. Indeed, the 
fact which Mr. Bain brings out so clearly, namely, that when thought I 
there is not the slightest break in the line of physical sequences, and that 
when thought ends there is no perceptible addition' to the sum of the phy- 
sical forces of the universe, is conclusive evidence that the physical and the 
psychical are not mutually correlative. But if mind cannot be got from mat- 
ter, still less can man be got from the brute. Ilis possession of general 
ideas, of self-consciousness, of a moral sense, and of free self-determination — 
in short, his personality — cannot have been derived by any process of devel- 
opment from the inferior creatures. Even if his body were descended from 
some primitive simian ancestor, his soul cannot be ; for the differences be- 
tween man's soul and the principle of intelligence in the lower animals, as 
Wallace has shown, are differences, not of degree, but of kind, so that there 
is no explanation of his lofty and complex being but that of the Scripture : 
"There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him 
understanding." But, last of all, there rises before us the form of the living 
Christ — a new beginning in human history, not to be explained from His 
Jewish antecedents — transforming human nature because He transcends 
human nature — and as we gaze upon Him we are compelled to confess the 
new-creating power of God. These three — organic life, the human soul, 
the realized ideal of manhood in Christ — these three owe their origin, not 
to processes of natural law, but to direct interpositions of God. Even if all 
the remaining history of the planet, from primeval fire-mist down, could be 
explained on principles of development, here are three great facts which can- 
not be so explained. The Philosophy of Evolution meets Life, in its three 
typical forms, as CEdipus met the Sphyux of ancient fable ; and since the 
Philosophy of Evolution cannot solve the riddle of Life, it must confess itself 
vanquished, and yield itself to death as gracefully as it may. 

So we add to the truth of Creation, which ensures God's independence 
and sovereignty, the other truth of Superintendence, which is inseparable 
from his omnipresence and control. He is in the universe while he is above 
it. — immanent while he is transcendent, — able to work upon occasion by 
direct exercise of will, while his ordinary method of working is through 
natural law. And, without taking into account this superintending care and 
wisdom, none of the great assumed facts of evolution would be credible or 
rational. The rotation of the nebula, inexplicable except by some impact 
from without; the heat-producing condensation of the diffused mass, in 
spite of operative forces of repulsion; the origin of the varieties which 
natural selection finds ready to Its hand, and the most useful of Which ft 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 47 

only preserves ; the beauty of insect-wings and of diatom-markings, so much 
of which could serve no purpose of utility, because unseen by any eye but 
God's; the progress of life along a line of gradual improvement, instead of 
along a line of gradual deterioration, such as Mr. Darwin declares to be 
equally possible upon his theory; the history of human civilization, and the 
gradual overbalancing of sensual instincts by the force of moral ideas, — all 
these things are indications that something more than force, groping blindly 
to its ends, is at work in the universe; all these things are explicable only 
upon the view that there is a thinking mind, a loving heart, an ordaining 
will, who superintends the forces of matter and of mind, and directs them 
to the accomplishment of a plan of far-reaching wisdom. But such a view 
can find no standing ground upon the premises of the Cosmic Philosophy. 
It is denounced as anthropomorphism — an unmanageable pseud-idea that 
lias no claim to respect. We see no reason why Mr. Spencer should be Unwil- 
ling to endow his all-originating force with the attributes of mind and will, 
unless it be this, that he knows too well that, if ho puts intelligence and 
freedom in at the beginning, he will be obliged to recognize them when rliey 
come out at the end. But this he cannot do, and adhere to his system. It 
is essential to that system to regard the universe as consisting only of one 
substance, of which matter and mind are equally manifestations. Now we 
cannot give up the natural dualism of our ordinary thinking, without calling 
mind matter, or matter mind. Mr. Spencer chooses the former alternative. 
To him mind is matter. At least it is conceived and construed under 
physical analogies, and the priority of thinking and willing spirit is denied. 
And so, having no mind at the beginning, he can have none at the end. 
Mind is really resolved into the motion of material particles, and man is 
logically reduced to an automaton. So monism convicts itself of folly. Its 
conceit of wisdom ends in degrading man, instead of exalting him. This is 
worse than the fate of Ulysses' companions, for Circe's cup only turned men 
into swine, — this philosophy makes them machines. 

2. What estimate shall we place upon Mr. Spencer's theory of knowledge? 
Can the human mind cognize truth, — can we reach reality? If not, philos- 
ophy would seem the vainest of vain pursuits. But, if we are to have knowl- 
edge at the end, we must have knowledge at the beginning. The child whose 
study of the alphabet should lead him to the conclusion that A was probably 
A, — but then, it might also be B, or it might be nothing, — would surely have 
a very insecure basis for his future attainments. If I do not know with 
absolute certainty that I think, that I exist, that my faculties in their normal 
action do not deceive me, how can I possibly know any of the other things 
that are built upon these foundations? But now comes Mr. Spencer, and 
assures us that nothing can be absolutely known. The 'relativity of knowl- 
edge' — misleading and fatal phrase, borrowed though it be from Mansel and 
Hamilton — is a very watchword of this philosophy. All knowledge, it is said, 
is relative to the knowing agent; that is, what we know, we know, not as it 
is objectively, but only as it is related to our senses and faculties. The 
conclusion is drawn, that there is ever a subjective element in what we call 
knowledge, which vitiates it and robs It of its certainty. Now we regard 
this whole method of representation as a most reprehensible mystification 



48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 

of the truth. We grant that we can know only that which has relation to 
our faculties. But this is only to say that we know only that which we coruo 
into mental contact with, that is, we know only what we know. But we deny 
that what we come into mental contact with Is known by us as other 
than it is. So far as it is known at all, it is known as it is. In other words 
the laws of our knowing are not merely arbitrary and regulative, but corre- 
spond to the nature of things, — they are laws of thought because they are 
laws of things. Upon the opposite principle, man's search for truth is the 
boy's search for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. Who will search 
for truth, if there be no truth to be found? Every elaborate philosophy 
like Mr. Spencer's is a practical refutation of the relativity of knowledge. 
It must contradict itself, indeed, to maintain a moment's existence. As 
another has put the words into Mr. Spencer's mouth, so we may quote them : 
"All knowledge is, not absolute, but relative. Our knowledge of this fact, 
however, is not relative but absolute!" Therefore it is not absolutely trup 
that all knowledge is relative, and Mr. Spencer's theory of knowledge falls 
to the ground. 

Now the truths which we must know as the conditions and foundations of 
all other knowledge are of the class called a priori. Space, time, substance, 
cause, design. God — these are cognitions incontrovertibly prior to all others. 
They cannot be derived from experience, because without them no experi- 
ence is possible. They cannot be derived from reasoning, because all reas- 
oning, inductive as well as deductive, is founded upon them. And yet they 
are not things perceived by the senses — they are cognized by the mind. 
Sense occasions them, but does not account for them. Plato thought them 
reminiscences of things apprehended in a previous state of being. We see 
that they are part of the original furniture of the reason, which experience 
draws forth from latency into power. The mind is not a tabula rasa at the 
start, but is so constituted that upon occasion of cognizing body it necessa- 
rily perceives that body to exist in space ; upon occasion of cognizing suc- 
cession, it necessarily perceives that succession to exist in time ; upon 
occasion of cognizing qualities, it necessarily perceives the existence of sub- 
stance in which qualities inhere and find their unity; upon occasion of 
cognizing change, it necessarily perceives that change to be due to some 
producing cause or power ; upon occasion of cognizing order and useful 
collocation pervading a system, it necessarily perceives this to be the result 
of design; upon occasion of cognizing fiuiteness, dependence and obligation, 
it necessarily perceives the existence of an infinite and independent being, 
to whom obligation is due. These truths do not come to us as the result of 
observation or inference, because both observation and inference presuppose 
them. You could not observe the dispositions of matter, without the prior 
idea of space. You could not conduct any process of inference, except up >n 
the tacit assumption of a designing intelligence which has so put things in 
relation that you can argue from one to the other. There can be no science 
of the merely relative. What we call law is something utterly imperceptible 
to the senses. Mere successions and coexistences give no relations — the 
senses perceive no connecting link between external facts, — and science la 
the pursuit of relations, not the cataloguing of facts. And a philosophy that 
ignores or denies these a priori cognitions of the human mind, not only 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 49 

forfeits its claim to be called a philosophy, but opens the way for a thor- 
ough-going and boundless skepticism; for if the mind's testimony to these 
most fundamental of all truths be cast away as worthless, then no other 
knowledge, however plausible it may seem, is worthy of a moment's confi- 
dence. 

Mr. Spencer's treatment of this most important matter is ingenious in the 
extreme. Positivism, with its denial that we can know anything but the 
phenomena of sense, is too bald a misrepresentation of the facts of con- 
sciousness. Mr, Lewes's idea that the mere recording of facts is philosophy. 
and the only philosophy, does not satisfy the aspirations of so great a thinker 
as Mr. Spencer. We cannot deny that there is an a priori element in our 
knowledge which the acquisitions of no single lifetime can explain ; each 
man finds himself in possession of ideas, the origin of which he cannot trace 
to his own observation and experience. Now. the new system professes to 
recognize the a priori element in all human knowledge, while yet it shows 
this a priori element to have been derived from the sense-experiences of 
past generations. It is transcendental for the individual, but empirical for 
the race. Well, let us be thankful for small favors from Mr. Spencer's 
school ! Even this is an advance on John Stuart Mill, who denied that we 
had any reason to believe even the axioms of mathematics to be valid in 
other worlds than ours, and according to whose view two parallel lines might 
possibly enclose a space in the star Sirius, and three times three make ten 
in Orion. Such an attempt, as this of Mr. Spencer, to make peace with the 
intuitionalists, shows that the intuitionalist artillery has done some execution 
within the enemy's lines. None the less is it true that the peace proposed 
is a hollow and delusive one. No peace is possible except upon surrender 
of the sensationalist position. Mr. Spencer assumes, provisionally, the 
validity of these a priori truths, only that he may the more effectively argue 
rhem out of existence. And he can do no otherwise. He must assume these 
necessary laws even in his argument to show that they are not necessary. 
We propose to him, therefore, a dilemma. Either these assumptions are 
true, and then his argument against them must be false; or, these assump 
tions are false, and then the argument which is built upon them is false, 
likewise. In either case, as has been said, he plants his battery over an 
adversary's mine, and is hoisted at his first fire. 

What is gained by carrying back the origin of these ideas to past millen- 
niums, when the demand for explanation is the same even there? Of what 
avail is it to call them the results of past experiences of the race, when the 
first experience presupposes them and is impossible without them? The 
first experience of individual positions of external matter logically presup- 
poses the knowledge of space. The first act of self -consciousness or judg- 
ment presupposes memory and the knowledge of time. They cannot be an 
outgrowth of successive inductions of primitive man, for the first induction 
was impossible without the assumptions of cause and design and the implicit 
acceptance of all the laws of logical reasoning. Mr. Spencer tells us that 
all cognition is really recognition ; but when we ask how, then, there could 
be a first cognition, he mumbles something about gradual growth and slowly 
accumulating impressions, — but there is absolutely no explanation of the 
first fact of actual attention or observation or memory or judgment or rea- 
4 



60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 

Boning. In truth, nothing so clearly shows Mr. Spencer's Ignorance or 
evasion of the real question at Issue as his treatment of the intuitions. To 
him, they are not different in essence from the accumulated force of associa- 
tion in the brute; to him, there is as much in the dog to be accounted for 
as in the man. We do not envy him his view of the human mind, although 
we can easily see how his philosophy corresponds to it. It is a good 
philosophy for the brute, for it is a plausible explanation of the brute's 
psychology; but self-respect forbids our accepting it as a philosophy for 
man. It is easy to see that, however much regard Mr. Spencer may think 
it politic to pay to the intuitions at the outset of his investigations, they are 
left with but sorry claims to respect at the end of his investigations. AH 
knowledge is proved to be only transformed sensation, and these a priori 
knowledges among the rest. And, now that we know just what they have 
come from, we can judge of their weight and validity. Here is much that 
sensation cannot justly give. Let it be regarded, therefore, only as provi- 
sional and regulative truth ; in other words, let us give it as little credence 
as we can, and as soon as possible let us us get rid of it altogether. So the 
realism with which Mr. Spencer begins turns out to be an exceedingly 
transfigured realism. In fact, when we hear him saying of consciousness 
that it "contains no element, relation or law that is like any element, relation 
or law in the external body," it seems to be hardly distinguishable from 
idealism. And here Mr. Spencer belongs. He is an idealist, though a 
materialistic idealist. Dr. Carpenter can say: "That whatever thinks 
exists, is known to us as a necessary a priori truth by its own evidence ; 
but that I myself exist is known to me, not by evidence of any kind, but by 
consciousness, to be a particular contingent fact of supreme certainty." 
But Mr. Spencer cannot consistently say this. That the external world 
exists, or that spirit exists within, must be upon his principles problemat- 
ical. He and his school are Humists. The soul, to them, is but a screen 
for shadows, or rather a mere succession of shadows without any screen, 
though it passes knowledge how they can be certain that even the shadows 
themselves exist. 

The chief evil of this system of philosophy is, however, that it shuts out 
all knowledge of God. It claims to be far more reverent than orthodox 
religionists, in that it abstains from all sacrilegious endeavors to describe or 
define that which is essentially and forever unknowable. The force which 
Is manifested in the processes of nature it declares to be beyond human 
conception, and what is inconceivable must be unknown. Now, we admit 
that we know only that of which we can conceive, if by "conceive" we mean 
our distinguishing, in thought, the object known from all other objects. 
This we claim we can do with respect to God. We distinguish him, as the 
infinite Spirit, Love and Holiness, from every other being whatever. But, 
by "conceive," Mr. Spencer means something entirely different from this, 
namely, to form an adequate mental image. He confounds conception with 
that which is merely its occasional accompaniment and help — the picturing 
of the object by the imagination. This is an erroneous use of the word 
"conception," and, taken in this sense, conceivahility is by no means a final 
test of truth. The formation of a mental image is not essential either to 
conception or to knowledge. As a matter of fact, we both conceive and 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 51 

know many things of which we cannot form a mental image of any sort thai 
In the least corresponds to the reality. We know our own minds; but who 
can picture to himself the form or substance of that which he thus knows? 
We have a conception of space, in the sense that we can distinguish it in 
thought from the body that 611s it, and from the time in which that body 
moves; but who can figure space in his imagination? The mind possesses 
the body; the soul is present, there is reason to suppose, In every part of 
the body at once, even as God is in every part of his universe — totus in 
omtii parte — but who can image the soul under spatial relations? Yet, 
certain of these unpicturable things are positively known to be true. To 
conceive is not to picture; and, therefore, the fact that we cannot form an 
adequate mental image of God is no proof that we cannot conceive of him 
or know him. The truth is that Mr. Spencer's test of inconceivability is 
not only false in itself; he applies it arbitrarily, and at times surrenders it 
altogether. For example, the idea of a self-eNistent and infinite mind ami 
will is rejected because, in Mr. Spencer's sense, it is inconceivable. Mr. 
Spencer allows thai the force, of which all things are manifestations, is 
equally inconceivable; but, in spite of its inconceivability, he accepts the 
idea of it as the most primitive and fundamental of truths. Such a test is 
(i convenient one — it will admit Mr. Spencer's God, but will shut out every 
other man's. 

But the stock-objection to theism employed by the philosophy of nescience 
Is that God cannot be known, because to know is to limit or define; hence, 
it is concluded that the Absolute as unlimited, and the Infinite as undefined, 
cannot possibly be known. But we reply that such an infinite aud absolute 
as Mr. Spencer has in mind is a mere abstraction and chimera, — it is not the 
being for the knowledge of whom we are contending. To this being the 
most fundamental of all attributes is that of perfection ; all other attributes 
are qualified by this. A God iucapable of movement or revelation is not 
the God of whom we speak, nor have we in mind a God who can be all 
things evil as well as all things good. God is absolute, not as existing in no 
relation, but as existing in no necessary relation. No relation is imposed 
upon him from without. If he enters into relations, he does it by virtue of 
a self-determination from within ; and if he continues in these relations, he 
does it in perfect freedom. So, God is infinite, not as excluding all co-ex- 
istence of the finite with himself ; for a God who must in the nature of things 
be the sole being, cut off from all communication of himself to others, is 
laden with imperfection and impotence. God is infinite, then, as being the 
ground of the finite, and so unfettered by it. He is, therefore, a being so 
limited and defined as to render knowledge of him possible. Indeed, it is 
not irreverence to say that in his own moral nature and unchangeableness 
he is the most limited being in the universe; but that he cannot lie or sin 
or die is his perfection and glory. Here, too, Mr. Spencer's rejects theism 
upon grounds which should compel Lim to reject the doctrine of force also. 
For, while he declares that by becoming cause God would cease to be abso- 
lute, his unknowable force becomes cause without impairing its absoluteness 
in the least. "But if it can be cause without ceasing to be absolute," says 
an able critic, "why can it not be known without ceasing to be absolute? 
So, too, if everything known is a form of the unknowable, the unknowable 



52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 

Is modified, and the absolute or unmodified unknowable has no existence. 
But if the absolute can be modified without ceasing to be absolute, why can 
it not be known without ceasing to be absolute?" We can then know God 
in relation, and this is the only God we wish to know or need to know. 
And all this Mr. Spencer practically confesses when he confers upon his 
Unknowable so great a number of definite and characterizing appellatives. 
One cannot even call a thing unknown and unknowable without showing 
that he already knows one thing about it, namely, that he does not know it 
and that it cannot be known. But how great the compass of one's knowl- 
edge must be when he is able to speak of this Unknowable, as Mr. Spencer 
does in various places, as the one, eternal, ubiquitious, infinite, ultimate, 
absolute existence, power and cause ! Here are nine separate designations, 
and with the term " unknowable" we have ten. It is absurd to say that an 
Infinite and Absolute that can be thus described and defined is beyond the 
sphere of human knowledge. 

Mr. Spencer's quarrel, however, is chiefly with the idea of personality. 
This he would extirpate as a self-contradictory and meaningless notion when 
applied to the power that moves in nature and in mind. The uniformities 
of natural order, he would say, negative God's personality ; in other words, 
absolute regularity of action excludes the possibility of intelligence and free- 
dom. But is this true? Do we call the capricious variability of childhood 
the best evidence of purpose and wisdom? On the other hand, do we not 
find that increasing maturity always brings with it increase of system? 
Are not the wise man's actions the easiest to predict? What is this 
but to say that the more perfect intelligence and will become, the more 
uniform is the thought and life? The nearer we approach to ideal person- 
ality, the more we escape from caprice and thoughtlessness. Why then 
should we refuse to apply the predicate 'personal' to God? The perfect 
personality might be perfectly regular in the methods of his operation. Mr. 
Spencer claims, indeed, that he only refuses to attribute personality to the 
power above us because he believes in something higher— something as far 
above personality as our intelligence and will are above the modes of being 
of the plant. But so long as he refuses to recognize what we can know, it 
is vain to console us by assuring us that something exists which we cannot 
know. It must ever remain true that a being without intelligence and will 
must be less perfect than one who possesses them. We see in our own 
being, if not in the outward world, effects which demand a personal cause. 
The very constitution of our minds compels us to attribute to that cause, 
though in an infinite degree, all the highest qualities of the human spirit; 
to recognize that the methods of the divine mind and of the human mind 
are similar, and that man is made in God's image. All this, theism recog- 
nizes, but agnosticism denies. Yet Mr. Spencer fancies himself a mediator 
between science and religion. He proposes terms of reconciliation between 
these two. They are ancient enemies, he says, but only ignorance of each 
other keeps them apart. He has discovered the truth which they hold in 
common. Let each give up that which is purely accidental, and unite upon 
that which is essential and eternal. What is this common truth? It is 
simply this: There is a Causal Powor which is inscrutable to man. Now 
this is, to say the least, a very abstract account of religious belief. Mr. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 53 

Spencer claims that it is all in which the various religions can be said to 
agree. This we deny. We maintain, on the other hand, that personality 
in the cause or causes which control and vivify the universe is an indestruct- 
ible element in every religion, from fetichism up to Christianity. The sense 
of mystery and dependence is not religion ; it is only the felt need of religion. 
Religion is the practical faith in a personal power, or in personal powers, 
that comes in to supply that felt need. The religion which -Mr. Spencer 
would save is nothing that now goes by that name. It is simply the recog- 
nition of a need that is never satisfied. The truly religious man must be a 
Tantalus. The moment he professes to know anything about the inscrutable 
power around him and above him, he becomes an example of the impiety of 
the pious. The moment he tries to satisfy his need of religion, he ceases to 
be religious. What practical difference is there between saying that there 
is no God, and saying that there is no God apprehensible by us, no God 
that we can distinguish from the sum total of things, no God that certainly 
exists apart from our subjective ideas of Him? 

3. We have thus tested Mr. Spencer's philosophical principles by inquir- 
ing whether they could explain the origin of life and mind, and whether 
they led to a proper theory of knowledge. Let us now, with greater brevity, 
ask with regard to the moral aspects of the system, and its influence upon 
practical life. Here, as in every scheme of moral philosophy, all the im- 
portant questions may be reduced to four, and they all centre in the idea of 
obligation. The first is a question about right : What is the historical origin 
of the feeling of obligation ? The second has to do with law : What is the 
rational ground of obligation ? The third concerns itself with conscience : 
What is the psychological faculty which determines obligation? And the 
fourth is conversant with will : What power is there to discharge obligation ? 

To the first of these questions Mr. Spencer replies that the feeling of obli- 
gation is the result of ancestral experiences of utility. Right is adaptation 
of constitution to conditions. Action unfitted to its surroundings has devel- 
oped a generic repugnance to similar action in future, and accumulated 
impressions of this unfitness have become transformed into an instinct so 
strong and persistent that it is at last independent of conscious experience, 
and is worthy the name of an intuition. Now we readily grant that an 
instinctive appetency for certain courses of action, and a blind aversion to 
certain others, might be plausibly accounted for in this way. We object to 
the theory that it fails to account for the very thing to be accounted for, 
namely, the feeling that the latter are reprehensible and the former obliga- 
tory. In short, right is confounded with advantage, and wrong with mere 
unfitness or in utility. All the languages of mankind distinguish between these 
two ideas and put an uumeasurable gulf between them. The awkward coun- 
tryman at a full-dress reception has a crushing sense of his unfitness to his 
surroundings, but who would call his feelings those of remorse? I look 
back with satisfaction to some past right action ; do I mean when I call it 
right, that it was an action that brought me pleasure or advantage? No, 
the moral feelings are of a wholly different sort — they affirm not advantage 
but obligation. The peculiarity of these feelings is that they refer action, 
not to an external standard of utility, but to an inward standard of right. 
The words "I ought!" have in them an imperativeness which U wholly 



54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BVOLt I JON. 

absent wben I am calculating what self-interest may be. The old A- 
tionalism account* d for the sentiment of obligation by calling it the- result 
of eflueation or of human enactment. It was well replied : If the sense of 
right comes from education, whence did the first educator, that is, the first 
man, derive it? And can it come from law, when law is founded upon obli- 
gation and simply expresses it? But Mr. Spencer has discovered a more 
excellent way. The sense of right is but the transformed feeling of utility 
"i- fitness. If this be so. there must have been a first time wben utility or 
fitness was seen to be right; in other words, when useful or fit action was 
seen to be obligatory. Now. he who knows what snow is, and what white 
is, may affirm that snow is white. But the man who had no notion of snow, 
or of white, could never affirm the one of the other. So he who first per- 
ceived that the useful was obligatory must have brought this notion of the 
obligatory with him, instead of getting it from the utility he was scrutiniz- 
ing. In other words, the idea of right is not inherent in things or actions, 
but is brought to them by the mind. It does not come from experience, 
but is an intuition. And Mr. Spencer's attempt to account for the right, by 
calling it an outgrowth from the useful, labors under the same fatal difficulty 
which we saw attending his explanation of the other intuitions. In the very 
first recognition of right on the part of any human being we have neces- 
sarily involved a fact of intuition, the judging according to an inward stand- 
ard that transcends all experience, the evolution of a knowledge that comes 
from some higher source than mere nature. 

So we pass to the second of the questions with regard to the moral aspects 
of the system. What is its view of law? In what is this recognized obliga- 
tion grounded? Mr. Spencer's answer is, by implication, already before 
us. An action is right, not only as it Is useful, but because it is useful. The 
foundation of moral obligation is in utility, and this utility is to be found in 
happiness — in the last analysis, the happiness of the individual. It is 
enough to say that the common judgment of mankind reverses this order, 
and declares an action to be useful because it is right, and not right because 
it is useful. To be virtuous for the sake of the happiness that is to come 
thereby is not to be virtuous at all. Supreme regard for our own interest is 
not virtue, but is selfishness, the opposite of all virtue. In truth, it is a 
most serious mistake to regard happiness in any sense, even the happiness 
of the universe including God himself, as the highest good or as the ground 
of duty. For this is to say that virtue is not a good in itself, but is good 
only for the sake of happiness, good only as a means to an end. It is to say 
that in eternity past, before creation began, God was holy only for the sake 
of the happiness that holiness would bring— in other words, that holiness 
has no independent existence in his being, and that he might be unholy if 
greater happiness would come thereby. This is to merge all his moral 
attributes in a profound and overmastering self-love, or what Is the same 
thing, to deny them altogether. So the theory that the general well-being 
is the highest end proves itself to be only a refined form of the utilitarian 
view — God is righteous only because of what he can make by it. Let those 
who maintain the good of being in general to be the ground of obligation 
ask themselves, why they are bound to seek the general good. That ques- 
tion demands an answer. The only answer will be because God has so mada 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 55 

us. We are created in his image, aud we reach the end of our being only 
by conforming to his character. In short, the moral character of God, iu 
whose image we are made, and not the good that will come from right action, 
is the true ground of moral obligation. How far from this view Mr. Spencer 
is, we have sufficiently seen. All virtue is reduced to the slippery calcula- 
tion of our personal interest, and unselfish action for right's sake and for 
God's sake is not only excluded from the category of morality, but is ren- 
dered logically impossible. 

We do not ueed to answer at length our third and fourth questions. We 
asked what upon this theory was conscience. The only reply is that con- 
science is simply the mind's power of comparing utilities. No intuitional 
element enters into it. With no hold upon God's law or God's nature to 
steady it, it is simply the record of shifting human opinion. There is no 
immutable morality for it to echo, and conscience has no power to echo it, if 
there were. What seem to be the impulses of a higher power, commanding 
obedience to the right, are only misinterpreted instincts to secure our own 
advantage ; what seem to be the threats of a coming judgment upon wrong 
doing, are but base-born and cowardly fears of ill success. A faculty that 
cognizes the right as distinct from the agreeable, and that affirms its ever- 
lasting obligatoriness, a faculty that adds its sanction to all subordinate 
judgments as to right which are formed by the intellect, and invests thein 
with its own indefeasible authority— such a faculty as this cannot well be 
evolved out of mere pleasurable and distasteful sensations. But such n 
faculty conscience really is, and because it is such a faculty there is no room 
for it in the system of Mr. Spencer. And it is just so with will, the last sub- 
ject of our questioning. Free-will — the executive faculty of the soul, the 
power of discharging obligation — how can this find place in a scheme of 
blind material development? Nothing can come out at the end but what 
goes in at the beginning. Without freedom in the Creator, you can have n<> 
freedom in the creature. What seems to be freedom, therefore, is but a 
show. Man's will is necessitated in its action by his external circumstances 
and conditions. He is not a moral agent. History is a fatalistic develop 
ment. In short, Ethics is only another name for Physics. 

Cicero is reported to have said, with regard to the first of these moral 
questions, that he who confounded the honestum with the utile, or the right 
with mere advantage, deserved to be banished from society. Since his 
judgment can hardly have been due to theological bigotry, it may well be 
commended to the consideration of all thorough-going evolutionists. We 
agree with Cicero in fearing the influence of such a system upon practical 
life. For, abstract and lofty as speculations like these may seem, like water 
from the clouds falling upon well-nigh impervious rock, they filter their 
way after a while to the lowermost strata of society. A system of monism 
like Mr. Spencer's, with its delusive simplicity, has an inexpressible fascina- 
tion for those whose intellectual pride cannot brook the perpetual tyranny of 
pressing but unsolved problems. Especially is such a system attractive to 
that great multitude of men whose inmost moral feeling is one of dislike to 
the idea of a God who imposes moral law, and who will, execute penalty 
upon those who are unlike him in moral character. And besides these will be 
numbers who are carried away unawares by the popular current of opinion, 



56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 

and who accept this philosophy simply because they know no other. To all 
these, the breadth of its generalizations, the novelty of its solutions of per- 
plexing questions, and the wealth of scientific knowledge displayed in its 
illustrations, will make it seem a new gospel of science for mankind. 

I believe that this system will be destructive to morality, because history 
has abundantly shown that life follows doctrine. The denial of God's moral 
being and governorship takes away the practical authority of conscience. 
When the solemn voice of duty is hushed, and right is regarded as only an 
imposing name for utility or pleasure, there Is no longer any question 
whither men's passions and ambitions will lead them. The descent to the 
pit of rapacity and sensuality is sure, aud none the less for the philosophical 
composure with which the descent began. The philosopher himself may 
not reach the depths to which his followers are plunged. Early influences 
of habit and culture, and above all the Christian principles that by a sort of 
endosmosis have been unconsciously imbibed from the surrounding atmos- 
phere, still keep the thinker outwardly pure and inwardly satisfied. But 
the very basis of morality is gone from the system, and they whose educa- 
tion is conducted under its influence, and whose principles of living are 
derived wholly from it, will have no care for truth or love or duty for 
truth's or love's or duty's sake, and will learn to be false without self-re- 
proach, and to be vicious without fear. Crime is but a name for the ill-repute 
of crime ; make immorality reputable and it ceases at once to be ; the new 
Paul and Virginia, on their island, find that with their advanced ideas of 
obligation as grounded in the greatest happiness, they can do just what they 
please. I do not wonder that certain of the representatives of this school 
are already discussing, with some anxiety, in their Symposia, the question 
whether belief in a God is not after all necessary to morals. The signs of 
the times might teach them. Art has begun to feel the poisonous breath of 
the new philosophy, and the heroic and religious in both painting and 
sculpture have sensibly withered under it. Pictures for the boudoir have 
taken the place of pictures for the altar, and a broad immodesty or a piquancy 
of evil suggestion largely supplants the pure simplicity and lofty purpose of 
an earlier day. And literature — how vast the change since the transcen- 
dental and ideal poetry of Wordsworth gave way to the pagan sensuousness of 
Algernon Swinburne. All these things are signs of moral decadence under 
the influence of the general philosophical spirit of our day — a spirit of 
which Mr. Spencer's system is the most conspicuous and typical example. 
Let us remember that Epicurus and Lucretius were genial philosophers, but 
the results of their fatalism in practice are seen in the shamelessness of the 
Pompeian frescoes, and in the atrocities of the Roman gladiatorial shows 
under the empire. Thus, with the loss of a God who can be known and 
obeyed, we lose every true interest of man. To oppose a philosophy which 
results in so great disaster is therefore the duty of every lover of his kind. 
It is a congeries of fallacies and of assumptions, but the most vital point at 
which it may be attacked is its denial of the divine creatorship. There is 
the first root-falsehood of the scheme; for. without creatorship. God cannot 
be sovereign over the universe, but must ever fill the subordinate place of 
a fashioner of intractable material made ready to his hand : indeed, without 
creatorship. God cannot be personal now that the universe exists, for 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 5.7 

necessarily bound to a self-existent universe is no longer self -determining 
or free. The Christian philosopher or theologian who grants the eternity 
of matter plays unconsciously into the hands of the enemy. The very 
book-revelation that is so denounced and contemned bears on its forefront 
the one and only solution to the problem of the universe: "In the begin- 
ning God created the heaven and the earth." The Sabbath, the weekly 
memorial of creation, revenges itself on its violators, by proclaiming with all 
Its multitudinous bells the personality of God, manifested not only in the 
first creation of the universe, but in the new creation of humanity at the 
resurrection of Christ. And with the Bible and the Sabbath every heart that 
has been brought into living, loving relation to the heavenly Father, gives in 
its testimony, not only that God is, and that he can be known, but that this 
is eternal life that we might know him. To this crowd of witnesses let us 
join ourselves. For I am persuaded that in this day, when the popular 
currents of the scientific world are running toward a theory of atheistic evo- 
lution which would sweep away the very foundations of knowledge, break 
down the principles of morality, degrade man to the level of the brute, and 
hurl almighty wisdom and love and justice from its throne, we can have set 
before us no nobler task than that of leading the van of a return movement 
to the old faith in man, the truth, and God. 



V. 
MODERN IDEALISM/ 



The method of thought which I purpose to consider regards ideas as the 
only objects of knowledge and denies the independent existence of the ex- 
ternal world. It is the development of a principle found as far back as 
Ix)cke. Locke derived all our knowledge from sensation. If any object to 
this account of Locke's system, and insist that he recognized reflection also 
as a source of knowledge, we reply that this reflection is with Locke only the 
mind's putting together of ideas derived from the senses or from its own 
operations about them.f The mind brings no knowledge with it, has no 
original power ; it is merely the passive recipient and manipulator of ideas 
received from sensation, finding in its own operations no new material, but 
only the reflection of what originally came from sense. I do not mean that 
Locke is always consistent with himself; this he could not be. for, with all 
his effort to derive knowledge from the senses, there were objects, such as 
substance and cause, right and God, which persistently refused to be 
explained in this way. To Locke's statement "There is nothing in the 
intellect which was not beforehand in the sense," Leibnitz well replied: 
"Nothing but the intellect itself." But this reply recognized original 
powers of the mind, and the mind's cognition, upon occasion of sensation, 
of realities not perceived by sensation or derived from sensation. Locke's 
denial of such original powers and cognitions opened the way to the exclu- 
sive sensationalism of the French Condillac and Baron d'Holbach. So his 
system led to utilitarianism in morals and to skepticism in religion ; for 
how could the ideas of right or of God be derived from sense? and, if they 
did not come from sense, what right had they on this theory to exist at all? 

Bishop Berkeley, alarmed at what he thought* the necessarily materialistic 
implications of Locke's philosophy, attempted to save the idea of spirit by 
giving up the idea of matter ; or, to speak more accurately, by maintaining 
that we have no evidence that matter exists except in idea. The sensations 
which lead us to infer the existence of an outer world are themselves tha 
direct objects of our knowledge — why postulate external matter as causing 
them? They may be caused directly by God, whose omnipresent intelli- 
gence and power are capable of producing uniform and consistent impres- 
sions in or upon the minds of his creatures. This thought, existence, or 
ideal existence, Berkeley would say, is the only existence of the outer world 
worth contending for. An existence like this being assumed, materialism 
is vanquished, for the cause of ideas is to be found not in matter but in 
spirit, not in a self-existent nature but in a living God. No one who has 



* Trinted in the Bibliotheca Sacra, January, 1SS8. 
f Essay, book ii. chap. xii. 

58 



MODERN IDEALISM. ."»!> 

road Berkeley's "Principles of Human Knowledge" can fail to admire the 
spirit and aim of its author. That his theory can be held side by side with 
the profoundest belief in special divine revelation is plain, not only from 
the fact that Berkeley so held it. regarding his view as a bulwark of reli- 
gious faith, but from the fact that it was also the philosophy of Jonathan 
I'M wards. 

Hume, however, regarded Berkeley's application of the principle as only 
a partial one. Berkeley had said that externally we can be sure only of 
sensations- —cannot, therefore, be sure that a world independent of our 
sensations exists at all. Hume carried the principle further, and held that 
internally also we cannot be sure of anything but phenomena. We do not 
know mental substance within, any more than we know material substance 
without. John Stuart Mill only follows Hume, when he makes sensations 
the only objects of knowledge; defines matter as "a permanent possibility 
of sensation," and mind as "a series of feelings aware of itself." Thomas 
Huxley follows Hume, when he calls matter "only a name for the unknown 
cause of states of consciousness." Spencer, Bain and Tyndall are also 
Humists. All these regard the material atom as a mere centre of force — 
the hypothetical cause of sensations. In their view matter is a manifesta- 
tion of force; while, to the old materialism, force is a property of mat- 
ter. Unlike these later thinkers. Berkeley held most strenuously to the 
existence of spirit — for of spirit he thought we had direct knowledge in 
ourselves. The supposition of an unperceivable material substance was 
inconsistent with common sense; but the recognition of a personal and self- 
determining ego was a part of our common sense.* Yet Berkeley in certain 
passages verges towards Humism, as, for example, where he says: "The 
very existence of ideas constitutes the soul. Mind is a congeries of percep- 
tions. Take away perceptions, and you take away mind. Put the percep- 
tions, and you put the mind."f All we can say of Hume, therefore, is that 
he logically and consistently developed a principle which in germ, at lea-t, 
is found in Berkeley himself. And the agnostic and materialistic idealism 
of the present day is lineally descended from Locke, through Berkeley. It 
defines matter and mind alike in terms of sensation, and regards both as 
opposite sides or manifestations of one underlying and unknowable force. 
So, as Sydney Smith says, "Bishop Berkeley destroyed the world in one 
volume octavo, and nothing remained after his time but mind, which expe- 
rienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737." 

It is easy to see how mischievous must be the effect of such a system as 
this. If matter be only a permanent possibility of sensations, then the 
body through which we experience sensations is itself nothing but a possi- 
bility of sensations. If the human spirit be only a series of sensations, 
then the divine spirit also can be nothing more than a series of sensations. 
There is no body to have the sensations; and no spirit, either human or 
divine, to produce them. Kant, in Germany, revolted from these skeptical 
conclusions, and sought to reclaim philosophy by an examination of the 
soui'ces of human knowledge. He went back to Locke, and showed that 



* Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, p. 382. 

f Works, vol. iv., p. 438 — quoted in Frazer's Berkeley, p. 72. 



60 MODERN IDEALISM. 

all sense-perception involves elements not derived from sense, elements 
rather which are presupposed by sense. "Synthetic conceptions or judg- 
ments a priori" — space, time, cause, for example — are the conditions of 
all our intellectual operations. We cannot cognize the outer or the inner 
world, without finding these conceptions woven into the fabric of our 
knowledge. So far Kant did good service to Bcience. lie vindicated the 
intuitions, and showed that without them no knowledge is i>ossible. But 
he erred in not going far enough. lie claimed for these intuitions only a 
subjective existence and validity — they are necessities of our thinking, but 
they cannot be shown to have objective existence or validity. They are 
regulative principles merely — whether space, time, cause, substance, God, 
exist outside of us. mere reason cannot determine. But we reply that 
when our primitive beliefs are found to be simply regulative they will cease 
to regulate. The forms of thought are also facts of nature. The mind 
does not, like the glass of the kaleidoscope,* itself furnish the forms; it 
recognizes these as having an existence external to itself. Kant failed to 
see that, in cognizing the qualities of objects, the mind equally cognizes a 
substance to which the qualities belong; failed to see that the testimony 
of the reason to the existence of noumena is just as valid as the testimony 
of sense to the existence of phenomena. Substance is knowable to God and 
also to man ; and, in and with our knowing phenomena, substance is actually 
and equally known. 

Just this failure of Kant led Fichte to reduce all knowledge to the knowl- 
edge of self ; for. if our own ideas are the sole objects of knowledge, it is 
only by making the outer world a part of ourselves that we can rescue it 
from the category of the unknown. Schelling could find no medium 
between self and the world, or between self and God : hence he assumed a 
direct intuition of both; it was an intuition, however, which merged the 
ego in the Absolute, as Fichte had merged the Absolute in the ego ; there 
is identity between them. But if identity, how can the One ever become 
the many? Here we have the impulse to the system of Hegel, in which 
subjective idealism becomes complete. Hegel explains the development 
of the One into the many by saying simply that the laws of thought require 
this development, and that thought and being are one. So, without giving 
any explanation of the origin of these laws, life becomes logic, and logic 
becomes life. The Rational is the Real. All things are but forms of 
thought, and not only man and the world, but God himself, are made 
intelligible. If it were not for the fact of sin, and for personal wills that 
war against the rational and involve themselves in death, the scheme of 
Hegel would be very attractive. We need only set against it the lines of 
Wordsworth, which Frazer quotes :f 

'Look up to heaven! the industrious sun 
Already half his race hath run ; 
He cannot halt nor go astray, 
But our immortal spirits may." 

Thus Hegel revives, and carries to its extremest conclusions, the idealis- 
tic principle whose development it was Kant's purpose to check. As Berke- 



Bishop Temple. Bampton Lectures for 1SS4, p. 13. 
Frazer' s Berkeley, p. 205. 



MODERN IDEALISM. 61 

loy had declared that things arc only thoughts, Hegel declared that think- 
ing thinks. So there can be thinking without a thinker, thoughts that ar« 
not thought. It seems to us that in his system there are two fundamental 
errors, first, that of assuming a concept without any mind to form it ; and, 
secondly, that of assuming that a concept can work itself out into reality 
.vithout any will to execute it. Thoughts take the place of things, both as 
to cause and effect — all resting on the prior assumption that identity is 
causality, i. e., that the constituent elements of a thought are necessarily 
the cause of the thing which the thought represents. Yet the system of 
Hegel has had a strong influence upon later philosophy. Its monistic basis 
gratifies the speculative intellect. Its easy reduction of the facts of the uni- 
verse to logical order satisfies the aspiring spirit of man. We may even 
grant that its omniscient idealism has been a valuable counter-weight to the 
agnostic materialism of our day. Together with the evolutionary hypothe- 
sis of the origin of the world, it has found able advocates in Caird, Green 
and Seth, In Great Britain, and in Harris, Bowne and Royce in America. 
Unfortunately it requires of its consistent defenders, though fortunately its 
defenders are generally not consistent, a rejection of the facts of history and 
of our moral nature. Sin is a necessity of finiteness and progress. Even 
Jesus, as he was a man, must be a sinner. The sense of remorse and the 
belief in freedom are alike illusions. It can hold no view of God which 
regards him as a veritable moral personality, or as the author of a supernat- 
ural revelation. Conscience with its testimony to the voluntariness and the 
damnableness of sin, as it is the eternal witness against Pantheism, Is also 
the eternal witness against the Idealism of Hegel. We may believe that 
the utter inability of Hegelianism to explain or even to recognize the eth- 
ical problems of the universe is the chief reason for the recent cry, "Back 
to Kant!" by which the younger thinkers are summoned to return to the 
feet of a master who at least recognized a moral law and a God who vindi- 
cates it. 

As it is these younger thinkers whose position is matter of most present 
interest, I desire to retrace my steps for a moment, and go back to Eng- 
land and to those who came after Hume. As Kant in Germany thought to 
set up a barrier to Hume's skepticism by pointing out the a priori elements 
in all knowledge, so Reid in England maintained against Hume the prin- 
ciples of the Philosophy of Common Sense. Reid, though with some inac- 
curacies of statement, held to the doctrine of Natural Realism, reducing 
perception to an act of immediate and intuitive cognition. The notion of 
representative ideas as the object of perception was excluded. The mind 
comes directly in contact with external things. How it knows them we do 
not know, but we know as little how it can perceive itself. The knowledge 
of the external world is not made explicable, it is rather made inexplicable, 
by assuming that the direct object of perception is p. representative idea, 
which we have no means of comparing with the object which it represents. 
Reid did not distinguish between original and acquired perceptions, and he 
sometimes made sensation the occasion of suggesting, rather than the con- 
dition of perceiving, extended externality ; yet his services to Natural Real- 
ism were great, and philosophy will never cease to be his debtor. 

Sir William Hamilton sought to remedy the defects of Reid, and to re< 



62 MODERN IDEALISM. 

cluce the doctrine of common sense to a consistent system. He showed the 
absurdity of the scheme of representative perception, which declares the 
external world to be real, while yet it makes ideas to be the only objects of 
which we are conscious. Either we must "abolish any immediate, ideal, 
subjective object, representing; — or we must abolish any mediate, real, 
objective object, represented." * And yet even Hamilton was not self-con- 
sistent. Our knowledge of an external object is made up, he says of three 
factors, of which, if the total be represented by the number twelve, the ob- 
ject may be said to furnish six, the body three, and the mind three. Here 
an ideal element is admitted which may so vitiate the result as to render it 
impossible to say that we correctly apprehend the object at all. The sec- 
ondary qualities of matter, such as color, sound and smell, he grants to be 
•"not objects of perception at all, being only the unknown causes of sub- 
jective affections in the percipient, and therefore incapable of being imme- 
diately perceived." f Even the primary qualities of matter in external 
objects we do not apprehend directly, but only through "the consciousness 
that our locomotive energy is resisted, and not resisted by aught in the or- 
ganism itself. For in the consciousness of being thus resisted is involved, 
as a correlative, the consciousness of a resisting something." Porter also 
remarks that Hamilton does not explain how, in the necessity of finding for 
this effect an extra-organic cause, this "correlative," "resisting something" 
must be shown to be also extended. "The agent, the ego, as percipient 
and actor, is not extended; why may not the extra-organic agent and non- 
ego be non-extended, or why must it be extended?" J 

If we add now to this statement of Hamilton's doctrine the fact that in 
his view "sensation proper has no object but a subject-object," in other 
words, an affection of the animated organism, we shall see that his Natural 
Realism limits itself to a knowledge of primary qualities in our own organ- 
ism. If we go further and consider his concessions to Idealism, we shall be 
able to narrow d wn the controversy still more. In that remarkable table 
of systematic schemes of external perception which he has appended to his 
edition of the Works of Reid,§ he has defined Idealists as those who view 
the object of consciousness in perception as ideal, that is, as a phenomenon 
in or of mind. As denying that this ideal object has any external proto- 
type, they may be styled Absolute Idealists. The chief merit of Hamil- 
ton's classification, however, is to be found in his subdivision of Absolute 
Idealists into two subordinate classes, according as the Idea is, or is not, 
considered a modification of the percipient mind. We have then the two 
schemes of Egoistical and Non-egoistical Idealism. The former, is, in gen- 
eral, the scheme of the German thinkers ; the latter the scheme of the Eng- 
lish thinkers, notably of Berkeley. Of the former we have already said all 
that is needful ; with regard to the latter we wish to point out a fact that is 
not so generally understood, namely, that this form of Idealism regards the 
Idea not as a mode of the human mind. While it is not a mode of the 
mind, it may yet be in the mind — infused into it by God; or it may not 



• Dissertations on Reid, note C. pp. 816, 817. 
t Porter, Human Intellect, p. 237. 
j Porter, Human Intellect, pp. 184, 185. 
§ Note C, p. NIT. 



MODERN IDEALISM. 03 

be in the perceiving mind itself, but in the divine Intelligence, to which 
the perceiving mind is intimately present, and in which the perceiving 
mind views it. Lotze, of all the Germans, seems (o hold to this latter form 
of Idealism. The world to him is a series of phenomena, without value in 
itself, and having value only as its meaning is valuable; and the mind of 
man is '"like a spectator who comprehends the aesthetic significance of that 
which takes place on the stage of a theatre, and would gain nothing essen- 
tial if he were to see. besides, the machinery by means of which the changes 
are effected on the stage." * 

Bishop Berkeley in his earlier writings seemed to regard all knowledge 
as conversant with the affections of the percipient mind. He hardly dis- 
tinguished between the idea as an object and the idea as an act. The first 
statements seem, therefore, to be statements of subjective idealism. "Sense- 
percepts differ from the ideas of the imagination only in degree, not in 
kind; and both belong to the individual mind." t Bu * in later years 
Berkeley saw what some of his followers have not seen, namely, that things 
are not mere possible sensations — these would afford no explanation of the 
permanent existence of real objects. He came, therefore, to regard exter- 
nal things as cansed in a regular order by the divine will, and indepen- 
dently of our individual experience. When we look at external things, we 
look at ideal existences in the divine mind — archetypes — of which sense- 
experience may be said to be the recognition and realization in our intelli- 
gence. So Berkeley's later statements are statements of objective, as dis- 
tinguished from subjective, idealism. The world without has the best guar- 
antee for its reality and permanence in that it is the constant expression of 
an omnipresent and eternal Mind. The non-ego, in fact, is God, mani- 
festing his intelligence and his will. As we live, move and have our being 
in God physically, so we live, move and have our being in God mentally. 
Even self -consciousness has its basis in God's ideas of us ; and memory is 
only the reading of our past, in God's record-book. The existence of the 
inner as well as the outer world in God, while it is an ideal existence, is yet 
the most secure and permanent that can possibly be conceived. 

Here then we have an objective Idealism which is free from some of the 
objections to which the common German Idealism is exposed. It is inter- 
esting to note how gently Sir William Hamilton treated it. In a foot-note 
to the last-mentioned of his Dissertations he says : — 

"The general approximation of thorough-going Realism and thorough- 
going Idealism here given may, at first sight, be startling. On reflection, 
however, their radical affinity will prove well-grounded. Both build upon 
the same fundamental fact — that the extended object immediately per- 
ceived is identical with the extended object actually existing ; — for the 
truth of this fact, both can appeal to the common sense of mankind ; and 
to the common sense of mankind Berkeley did appeal, not less confidently, 
and perhaps more logically, than Reid. Natural Realism and Absolute 
Idealism are the only systems worthy of a philosopher; for, as they alone 
have any foundation in consciousness, so they alone have any consistency 
in themselves." 



* Lotze. Outlines of Metaphysics (Ladd), p. 152. 

j Adamsou on Berkeley, in Encyclopaedia Britanuica. 



*14 MODERN IDEALISM. 

And in his reply to (be Berkeleian, T. Collyns Simon, Hamilton expressly 
says : * — 

"If Berkeley held that the Deity caused one permanent material universe 
(be it supposed apart or not apart from his own essence), which universe, on 
coming into relation with our minds through the medium of our bodily organ- 
ism, is in certain of its correlative sides or phases, so to speak, external to our 
organism, objectively or really perceived (the primary qualities), or deter- 
mines in us certain subjective affections of which we are conscious (the sec- 
ondary qualities) ; in that case I must acknowledge Berkeley's theory to be 
virtually one of natural realism, the differences being only verbal. But 
again, if Berkeley held that the Deity caused no permanent material uni- 
verse to exist and to act uniformly as one, but does himself either infuse 
into our several minds the phenomena (ideas) perceived arid effective, or 
determines our several minds to elicit within consciousness such appre- 
hended qualities or felt affections, in that case I can recognize In Berkeley's 
theory only a scheme of theistic idealism, — in fact, only a scheme of per- 
petual and universal miracle, against which the law of parsimony is conclu- 
sive, if the divine interposition be not proved necessary to render possible 
the facts." 

Hamilton here seems to grant that Absolute Idealism, if it be non-egois- 
tical, and if it regard the ideal object as not in the mind itself, is virtually 
the same with Natural Realism. Whether this was the philosophy of 
Berkeley may be matter of question ; but it is at any rate along this line 
that our younger thinkers in philosophy are working. A world of ideas, 
indistinguishable by us from external realities, constituting in fact the onhj 
external realities, is open to our minds by virtue of our living, moving, and 
having our being, in God. In our investigations of nature as well as in our 
examination of our own consciousness, we are only, as Kepler said, "think- 
ing of God's thoughts after him," or rather perceiving the ideal realities of 
God's being. Such a conception is not necessarily merely logical, like 
Hegel's : God may be heart, as well as mind ; may be conscience and will, 
as well as intellect. But creation, on this view, is an ideal process; the 
world, before finite intelligences existed, had only an ideal existence in 
God's mind, even as it now exists only in the minds of God and of his 
creatures. 

There is a reason for this increasing prevalence of Idealism. Science has 
resolved the sensible universe into various modes of motion. Smell, sound, 
color, equally with pleasure and pain, are subjective sensations. The causes 
of them are not like in nature to the effects — they are only vibrations of 
some external medium, — 

" What sees is Mind, what hears Is Mind; 
The ear and eye are deaf and blind." 

What is true of the so-called secondary qualities of matter is equally true 
of the primary. Even extension and impenetrability can be conceived of 
only in relation to some sentient being which experiences resistence to its 
locomotive energy or which resists some locomotive energy from without. 
In fine, "matter can be defined only in terms of sensation; yet without 



* Veitch, Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, p. 346. 



MODERN IDEALISM. 05 

mind sensation Is impossible." Hence the idealist concludes that all that 
we know of matter is ideal. Certain sensations in ourselves comprise the 
whole of our knowledge. The causes of these sensations are unknown. 
Vibrations, motions, molecules, atoms, aye, even force itself, are but names 
for the unknown causes of our subjective states. Here is the refutation of 
materialism ; for matter can have no meaning except in connection with 
percipient mind. Materialism can never explain tbe nature of atoms ; they 
can be conceived of neither as indivisible nor as infinitely divisible. Even 
the materialistic conception of law involves the idea of mind as ordering the 
arrangements of the universe. The cause of our sensations does not need 
to be material — it may be spiritual instead. What we call the world out- 
side of us may be the constant product of a divine activity working upon 
our own minds ; better still, it may be a constant ideal divine presentation 
to our minds. 

There are many considerations once urged against Idealism which we 
must pronounce invalid against this new form of idealistic doctrine. It has 
been said that ideas, as given, presuppose an objective reality as cause. 
The new idealism accepts the dictum, but declares the world of ideas, as 
neither in the mind nor a modification of the mind, to be just such an ob- 
jective reality. In other words, objective idealism declines any longer to 
be treated as subjective idealism; it regards ideas as something distinct 
from the cognition of them ; it may even hold that these ideas are them- 
selves extended, and that they have all the qualities which we now attribute 
to the material and external object. May not God suggest ideas to me, 
which are not in me nor of me? Do we not, by words, suggest such ideas 
to one another? It may seem strange to hear of ideas which are not of the 
mind ; but the idealist would regard such ideas as actually constituting the 
objective reality which we perceive. Of such a sort he would regard even 
the extended matter which we see. It is an ideal object, existing only for 
intelligence, and as inseparable from intelligence as the pleasure or pain we 
feel in viewing it. The apple, for example, exists for mind and only for 
mind; yet it has an objective existence to the mind, and is not a mere mode 
of the mind. The best illustration of the theory, however, is derived from 
the mind's relation to abstract truth. This truth exists by virtue of the 
minds that perceive it ; yet it is neither in nor of the human mind alone. 
While it is objective to man, it is subjective to God. So, it may be argued, 
does the universe exist. God's ideas constitute its reality, its permanence, 
its stability. It is as little the product of the finite individual mind, as is 
the law of gravitation, or the existence of space, or the truth that right is 
obligatory. And yet it exists only in intelligence, and for intelligence; for, 
whether man is or is not, all things subsist eternally in God. 

Here is the theory which claims, equally with natural realism, that objects 
are perceived directly. The objection has frequently been made to the 
theory of representative perception, that either in spite of the idea objects 
remain unknown, or by means of it they become known, in which case there 
must be a comparison of ideas with their objects — a comparison which can 
have no meaning or value except upon the hypothesis that the objects are 
known already. But the theory we are considering is a theory of presenta- 
tive, and not of representative, idealism. In this theory the ideas are them- 
5 



<;g modern idealism. 

stives t lie objects, ami the only objects : as such they are perceived directly, 
and there can be no talk about comparing them with any reality beyond. 
Over against this simplest form of Idealism we desire to put the simplest 
form of Natural Realism, in order that we may compare the merits of the 
two. This simplest form of Natural Realism holds only that we know some- 
thing in space and time, something distinguishable from God as well as 
from ourselves, something which has permanent power to produce sensa- 
tions in us, something which continues to exist whether we perceive it or 
not. In short, Natural Realism holds to the existence of a somewhat inter- 
mediate between God and the soul, even though this somewhat be nothing 
more than force. God and the soul are not the only entities. The world 
exists not only ideally but also substantially, and this substantial world ex- 
ists in the form of extended externality. 

The first consideration which suggests itself in comparing these two op- 
posing views is that Objective Idealism rests upon the exceedingly precari- 
ous assumption that the mind is capable of knowing only ideas, while 
Natural Realism has in its favor the universal belief of mankind that we 
know things as well. Certainly the presumption is that the universal belief 
of mankind is a correct one; and this belief is not to be surrendered until it 
be shown self -contradictory. To say that things are ideas, is to common 
sense a yet greater absurdity. Men in general make a perfectly clear dis- 
tinction between thoughts and external objects, and they cannot be per- 
suaded to confound the one with the other. They may be persuaded to ac- 
cept a thousand vagaries with regard to the ultimate constitution of matter ; 
they may believe in ultimate atoms and vortex-rings ; even the fourth 
dimension of space may come to seem credible to them : but to dissolve the 
external world into a dream, even though that dream be a permanent one 
and the very image of reality, is beyond the utmost stretch of their cre- 
dulity. 

Idealism is inconsistent with itself. It is compelled to admit that in know- 
ing ideas the mind knows self. We cannot know ideas except by projecting 
them as it were from the mind.* Thus we cannot know the non-ego, even 
in the shape of ideas, without also knowing the ego that has the ideas. 
Self-consciousness then is a witness to the existence of a permanent some- 
what underneath all ideas, and which all ideas presuppose. But this per- 
manent somewhat which manifests itself in mental phenomena and is the 
subject of them, which in fact is known in and by the same concrete act in 
which we know our ideas, cannot possibly be conceived in any other way 
than as an indivisible, identical entity. It cannot itself be an idea, or a 
combination of ideas, for the very first idea presupposes it. It cannot be a 
mere succession of feelings, for the mind never knows itself as a succession 
of feelings — if it could do so. it would know itself as that which was not I. 
It cannot be simply a relation, for relation is inconceivable unless there are 
things or ideas to be related, and these things or ideas must go before the 
relation, whereas self is known not as the product of ideas but as producing 
ideas. So idealism is forced to grant the existence of something before 
ideas, and more than ideas, namely, the set*. But this permanent some- 



* J. Clark Murray, Hand book of Psychology, p. 279. 



MODERN IDEALISM. 



67 



what Which we call self is just such an entity as we designate by substance; 
ii ml the concession of the existence of mental substance logically carries 
with it the concession that material substance may exist also. 

Idealism of the objective sort tries in vain to maintain the purely ideal 
character of the external world, and at the same time to declare that the 
object perceived is different from the act of perception. But if the object 
perceived be different from the act of perception — in other words, if 
objective idealism be not resolved into subjective idealism, if non-egotistic 
idealism be not resolved into egotistic idealism — then the existence of the 
object cannot be dependent upon the percipient act, its esse cannot be per- 
dpi. Its intellectual existence, if we may so speak, is contingent upon the 
existence of a perceiving intellect. But this is only to say that it cannot be 
known without knowledge, cannot be apprehended without mind, cannot fulfil 
its purpose without being perceived, either by God or man. The error of the 
theory is in confounding intellectual existence, or the existence of the object 
as known, with its real existence. As Professor Knight has said: "That, 
the object perceived has a relation of intellectual dependence on the percip- 
ient subject is obvious, so far as his cognition extends ; but if the object 
perceived be different from the act of perception, it cannot be in any sense 
dependent on it, or on a similar act, for its existence." And so we agree 
with Veitch, when he says that Hamilton granted too much to Berkeley, 
in saying that a non-egotistical idealism is hardly distinguishable from 
natural realisms- 
Idealism gives no proper account of the distinction between the non-ego 
in the shape of ideas and the non-ego in the shape of our bodily organism ; 
in other words, it ignores the difference between body and the idea of 
body. Nothing can be plainer to the common mind than that it knows 
something outside of itself and different from itself, something extended, 
something in space, something which causes ideas but which is not itself 
ideas. . The mind not only distinguishes itself from the body it inhabits, 
but it distinguishes its ideas of body from the body of which it forms ideas. 
It ascribes to the body externality and extension. These properties cannot 
be conceived as belonging to ideas. The idea of body and the actual body 
are no less distinct than are the idea of a house and the actual house. Body 
is apprehended as something permanent and independent of our perception 
of it; but, more than this, it is apprehended as existing over against the 
percipient mind, as capable of measurement by the mind, as having spatial 
relations in a way that the mind has not. This belief in the existence of a 
real in distinction from a merely ideal body, a body that is extended and 
external to the mind, is the most primary and important fact of sense- 
perception. Idealism, by failing to explain this belief, fails at the most 
critical point of all. It attempts to confound outness with distance, whereas 
distance is only a peculiar degree of outness, and itself presupposes outness. 
And, as Veitch has well shown, the externality of the object of sense is no 
more unintelligible than is the externality of one mind to another mind, or 
to God.f Here we are persuaded that Natural Realism has a stronghold 
from which no speculative Idealism can ever dislodge it. Reduce the 



* Veitch's Hamilton, p. 178. 
t Veitch's Hamilton, pp. 18( 



-188. 



G8 MODERN IDEALISM. 

problem to its simplest terms if you will — put on the one side an objective 
idealism of divine ideas independent of our causation and perceived as 
something permanent and separate from our perceiving minds — put on tbe 
other side a natural realism, holding that we perceive an actually extended 
object in space, at least in our own organism, whose existence, as real, we 
distinguish from any possible ideal existence — and we must decide that the 
latter represents the facts of our experience, while the former contradicts 
them. 

Idealism finds in self the ground of unity for mental phenomena. It 
should find in material substance the ground of unity for material phenom- 
ena. Not that this knowledge of mental or material substance, as the case 
may be, is reached in either case by any process of inference or argument. 
It is the inevitable and universal judgment of the reason, in connection 
with self-consciousness, on the one hand, and of sense-perception on the 
other. When we recognize thoughts, we recognize the self as thinking: 
when we perceive qualities of matter, we perceive that they belong to some- 
thing which they qualify. The qualities and the substance qualified are 
known in the same concrete act ; though we ascribe to sense the cognition 
of quality, to reason the cognition of substance. Without this cognition of 
substance the impressions of sense could have no unity and could give us 
no knowledge of things. Sensation brings us in contact only with points. 
These points would be heterogeneous and disconnected if they were not 
recognized by some power as related to each other. Our knowledge of an 
object is not a knowledge of these points, but rather of a whole which these 
points manifest; these points can be related to each other, and fused into 
a whole, only by the recognition of a somewhat to which they belong and 
of which they are phenomena. The soul's judgment that there is a material 
substance, in which material qualities inhere and which gives these quali- 
ties their ground of unity, is just as inevitable an act of reason as that other 
judgment which accompanies the thoughts within and finds for them a 
ground of unity in the cognition of a mental substance which we call the 
conscious self. 

Idealism confounds the conditions of external knowledge with the objects 
of knowledge. What is the object of knowledge in sense-perception ? 
This theory replies: "The object of sense-perception is sensations or 
ideas;" and it propounds the dilemma: "Either the object is unknown 
and the mind knows only ideas, or ideas are known and there is no need of 
assuming the existence of any other object whatever." But the same rule 
should work equally well, or ill, when applied to the world within. We 
should then be compelled to say: "Either the ego is unknown and the 
mind knows only ideas, or the ideas are known and there is no need of 
assuming the existence of any ego at all." The majority of idealists will 
not say this. Berkeley would have denied it. for he strenuously held to the 
existence of spirit and to our consciousness of its existence. But it was by 
an inconsistency in his logic that he so held, and Hume remorselessly 
exposed this inconsistency. In self-consciousness we have the key to the 
problem. Mysterious as it might speculatively seem that mind should 
know self in knowing its own thoughts, it is still a fact that mind does thus 
know self; and to say that the thoughts are the only objects of knowled^' 



MODERN IDEALISM. 09 

is to confound objects of knowledge with conditions of knowledge. So, in 
the external world, we cannot know matter except through sensations and 
ideas ; but to make sensations and ideas the only objects of knowledge is 
here also to confound objects of knowledge with conditions of knowledge. 
In sense-perception, my ideas and sensations are mere conditions of knowl- 
edge. In and through them I cognize that which is beyond, that which 
produces in me the ideas and sensations, namely, external objects, at least 
in my own organism — objects which by analysis I see to include both sub- 
stance and quality. I see tiie moon in like manner through the telescope; 
the telescope is the means or condition of my seeing the mean. I may, it 
is true, turn my attention exclusively t<> the telescope and make that the 
object of my thought; yet lie would talk very absurdly who should say that 
either the moon is unknown and I know only the telescope, or the telescope 
is known and there is no need "f assuming the existence of any moon 
beyond it. The truth is that I cognize the moon through the telescope; 
if I choose I can think of both telescope and moon together ; but the 
absunlest of all things is to say that, in looking through the telescope, I see 
the telescope only and not the moon. So Idealism confounds the condi- 
tions of knowledge with the objects of knowledge. That through ideas and 
sensations we have knowledge of things, is one of the most indubitable facts 
of consciousness. 

The Idealist cannot be consistent without denying the existence of any 
other intelligent being besides himself. He claims that the mind can know 
only ideas. What we call the external world is only a succession or combi- 
nation of ideas, and hence no material substance can be known. But what 
we call our fellow-beings — are not they also only successions or combina- 
tions of ideas in which by the same rule no mental substance can be 
known? Self -consciousness compels the Idealist to recognize a self which 
is the permanent basis and habitat of his own ideas ; but why should he 
recognize the existence of other people? If material things are nothing 
but ideas, then our fellow-men are nothing but ideas. If my neighbor's 
body exists only in idea, then his soul must also exist only in idea. The 
mere fact that the highway robber, when he attacks me, seems to be a 
conscious personality, must not blind me to the fact that he, like the club 
which he carries, is but a series or combination of ideas. I shall be a very 
inconsistent Idealist if I regard that series of ideas as responsible or guilty ; 
for responsibility and guilt imply something more than a series or combina- 
tion of ideas — they imply a subject, a mind, a permanent self, endowed 
with conscience and free will. In short, we must become solipsists, believ- 
ers only in our own existence. But we cannot stop even here. The solip- 
sist cannot long believe even in the existence of himself, if by "himself" 
he means a permanent, identical, substantial soul. And as a matter of fact 
the new Psychology in Germany — the psychology of Wundt and Fechner, 
describes itself as "psychology without a soul." 

The new Idealism seeks to avoid the solipistic conclusion by taking 
refuge in the consciousness of God, and by making that the guarantee for 
the objective existence of our fellow-men. It is a vain resource. The same 
rule which deprives us of all guarantee for the existence of our fellow-men 
deprives us also of all guarantee for the existence of God If we know only 



70 MODE11N IDEALISM. 

Ideas in the case of our fellow-men, we can know only ideas In the case of 
God. And if God is only a series or combination of ideas, what possible 
meaning is there in the phrase "consciousness of God," the utterance of 
which seems such a relief to the Idealist? A consciousness, with no being 
to oe conscious; consciousness without a self; universal thinking without a 
thinker — ah, it is our old Hegelian acquaintance: "thinking thinks!" 
Notice how completely this philosophy merges the affeetional and the vo 
litional elements of the divine Being in the merely intellectual, ami then 
transmutes even that into the vague phrase "universal consciousness." It 
is the God without personality or moral character, without love or will, 
which the purely speculative intellect ever seeks to substitute for the living 
God, the God of holiness who denounces and punishes sin, the God of love 
who redeems from sin by his own atoning sacrifice. Did I say that this 
theory gave us a non-moral God — a stone in place of bread? It does not 
even give us this — a consistent idealism can give us no God at all, it can 
give us only the idea of him. If we know only ideas, we can have no more 
guarantee that God or man objectively exists than we can have for the 
objective existence of matter. 

Idealism is monistic in its whole conception of the universe. It claims 
to be a "one-substance" theory, although it should in consistency call 
itself a "no-substance" theory instead. It repudiates the doctrine of two 
substances, matter and mind, because it cannot understand how mind 
should ever in that case be able to know matter. Materialism declares that 
mind knows matter because mind is matter ; idealism declares that mind 
knows matter because matter is mind. The one is just as much an arbitrary 
assumption as is the other. Both are argument a ad ignorantiam. Be- 
cause we cannot explain how we know that which is other than ourselves, 
shall we deny that we do know things and beings other than ourselves? 
It is not essential to knowledge that there be identity or even similarity of 
nature between the knower and the known. God can know what sin is— 
aye, only God can fully know the nature of evil. It is just as much a prob- 
lem how we can know ourselves, as it is how we can know the external 
world. "The primitive dualism of consciousness" is just as inexplicable 
as the primitive dualism of substance. "The mental act in which self is 
known implies, like every other mental act, a perceiving subject and a per- 
ceived object. If then the object perceived is self, what is the subject 
that perceives? or, if it is the true self which thinks, what other self can it 
be that is thought of?" But this very consciousness of personality, this 
very cognition of self of which Herbert Spencer speaks, in the words I 
have quoted, he declares in the next sentence to be "a fact beyond all 
others the most certain," * and in spite of his subsequent attempts to 
explain it away, we may take his testimony as to the universal fact of its 
existence. But if man knows a non-ego in his own thoughts, he may know 
a non-ego in other beings or in the world outside of him ; and our inability 
to explain the mode of this knowledge should not for a moment shake our 
confidence in the fact. 

Idealism is compelled to recognize an action of the will upon matter,— 



* First Principles, p. 65. 



MODERN IDEALISM. 71 

why should it not with equal readiness recognize an action of the intellect 
upon matter? If I can move something outside myself, why can I not 
know something outside myself? It seems ahsurd to suppose that I pro- 
duce effects only upon an ideal world when I exert my powers of volition, 
— why is it not equally absurd to suppose that I know only an ideal world 
when I exert my powers of sense-perception? I come in contact with real 
things and real beings when I use iny will, — what right have I to say that 
I come in contact only with Ideas when I use my mind? And. when we rise 
to the consideration of God's relation to the world, what right have we to 
say that God's power exhausts itself in mere thinking, or that God is calla- 
ble of no creation bat the creation of ideas? Man can make a tiling whose 
existence continues after his own act upon it has ceased, — cannot God do 
the same? Man can give his thoughts objective shapes — Phidias and 
Praxiteles put their ideas into form and make them live forever, — cannot 
God give substantive expression to his thoughts also? Must God be shut 
up to an eternal process of thinking, without the power to create substances 
other than himself which shall in their various degrees reflect his wisdom 
and his love? Berkeley believes that God is himself a Spirit, and that he 
creates finite spirits of a different substance from himself. Why cannot he 
who has thus in finite spirits disjoined from himself a certain portion of 
spiritual force and given to it a relative independency, — why cannot he also 
and just as easily in material substance disjoin from himself a certain por- 
tion of physical force and give to it a relative independency? 

I have thus far treated Modern Idealism from a philosophical point of 
view, and I have endeavored to show that even from this point of view it 
possesses no advantages over the doctrine of Natural Realism. But we arc 
bound to look further, and to judge the new system by its probable influ- 
ence upon Christian faith. Is it consistent with the things "which have 
been fully established among us" — the accepted teachings of Scripture? I 
do not now ask whether noted Christian thinkers here and there have or 
have not held to the idealistic scheme. Here I have to do, not with the 
actual results, but with the logical tendencies of the system, while at the 
same time it may be well remembered that in the long run these logical ten- 
dencies make themselves practically felt. The first of these tendencies 
which I notice in the new philosophy is the tendency to merge all things in 
God. Dr. Krauth* very properly calls it the weakness of idealism that it 
finds unity not in the harmony of the things that differ, but in the absorp- 
tion of the one into the other. Instead of tracing all things to one source. 
it prefers the shorter and easier method of asserting that all things are but 
forms of one substance. The conception of a God who is all. seems to it 
preferable to that of a God who creates all. In this, the doctrine runs 
directly counter to the Scripture teaching that "in the beginning God cre- 
ated the heaven and the earth," and so removes the barrier which God him- 
self has set up against a pantheistic confounding of himself with his works. 
But further than this, idealism destroys all distinction between the possible 
and the actual. A possible universe, as already in God's thoughts, is 
already an actual universe; and, vice versa, an actual universe, as only in 



Berkeley's Principles of Knowledge, Krauth's Prolegomena, p. 130. 



72 MODERN IDEALISM. 

God's thoughts, is nothing more than a possible universe. The whole geo- 
logic and astronomic history of the universe before man came upon the 
planet was only a thought-history, — events, aside from God's thought of 
them, there were none. Such as they were, they always were ; and the 
universe is as eternal in the ppst as is God's thought of it, for God's thought 
is the universe. And since the future universe exists only in God's thought 
it is existent now as much as it will ever be. Preservation is only continu- 
ous creation; continuous creation is nothing but God's thinking; and God's 
thinking is from eternity to eternity. Second causes do not exist ; for, as 
things are but the ideas of God, all changes in these things are but the direct 
effects of a divine efficiency. All causal connections between different objects 
of the universe are at an end. No such things as physical forces exist. 
Nature becomes a mere phantom, and God is the only cause of all physical 
events. Science becomes at once, not the study of nature, but the study 
of God. 

I have said that Idealism destroys all distinction between the possible and 
the actual ; I must go further, and say that it destroys all distinction 
between truth and error. It holds that ideas alone are the objects of knowl- 
edge ; the world without and the world within are alike ideas ; these ideas 
constitute the world; and the existence of these ideas is due directly to the 
causative intelligence of God. But if ideas are the reality, how can man 
have false ideas? Is it not beyond dispute that we have ideas which do 
not correspond to the objective truth? Are these realities also? and is God 
the author of them? Men have selfish, sensual, murderous thoughts; they 
hate and malign God ; they slander and destroy his creatures. Are the>e 
lying ideas and representations eternal truths and realities also? Have we 
not here the proof that the divine ideas must differ from sense-ideas in us. 
and that our ideas are not the realities but only individual interpretations 
of reality, born of our wilfulness and moral perversion? Berkeley seems at 
times aware that there is a difficulty in identifying our ideas with the divine 
archetypes; but the fear of recognizing in these divine archetypes a new 
sort of "things in themselves" seems to have prevented him from making 
further explanations. Is it not plain that no explanation is possible that 
identifies the idea with the object? Does not this abolish the distinction 
between truth and error, and make both our right and our wrong the direct 
product of the divine will? 

Why should not Idealism go further, and declare that God is the only 
cause in the realm of spirit as well as in the realm of matter? If Idealism be 
not logically self-contradictory, it must do this. If my body, so far as it is 
objective to me, may be a mere idea of God, then my soul, so far as it is 
objective to me, may be a mere idea of God also. All my ideas are ideas of 
God, and God causes them. What becomes of my personal identity? 
What is to prevent Jonathan Edwards, as he does, from basing identity 
upon the arbitrary decree of God, and from declaring that God, merely by 
so decreeing, makes Adam's posterity one with their first father and respon- 
sible for his sin? What is to prevent the necessitarian from declaring that, 
since all motives are ideas, and all ideas are due to direct divine causation, 
the soul has no permanent existence of its own and no freedom that can 
furnish the slightest basis for responsibility? What we call the moral law 



MODERN IDEALISM. 73 

Is nothing but the presentation of a sublime divine idea; and what we call 
sin is nothing but the presentation of another divine idea which is given us 
simply to contrast with, and to emphasize, the first. Both evil and good 
are purely ideal. Not our wills but our thoughts are to be purged, and that 
by imparting to us both the good thoughts and the evil thoughts that are 
in the mind of God. The freedom to choose the good and to refuse the 
evil — this does not exist ; for this would imply the existence of a substance 
separate from that of God. God is equally the source of evil and of good, 
— the morally pure and the morally impure are both alike to him. What 
we have usually regarded as the greatest of blasphemies is only simple fact, 
for God is not only the author, but the sole author, of sin ; he is not only 
the sum and source of all good, he is also the sum and source of all evil. 

All this is to deny the testimony of conscience, and to strike at the roots 
of all morality. It is easy to see how the whole Christian doctrine of 
redemption goes by the board, when once sin is regarded as a natural neces- 
sity, and ideas are held to be the only real objects of knowledge. It is no 
longer necessary to believe in an external revelation of God's will. Internal 
revelation, Christian consciousness, the direct presentation to our minds of 
new ideas from God, takes the place of outward Scripture, or assumes coor- 
dinate importance and authority with it. It is no longer necessary to make 
a clear distinction between ideal characterization and real history. Jesus 
Christ, with his resurrection from the dead, his atoning death and ascen- 
sion to the Father, can now be conceived of after an ideal fashion. These 
things never were, as they are pictured to be; but that makes little differ- 
ence, — the object Is attained — namely, the fostering of an idea in our 
minds. Historical testimony becomes of little account when It contradicts 
a preconceived theory ; the idea is better than the fact- — for the fact itself 
is only an idea. And if it be suggested that to the man who thus turns 
God's facts into mere ideas, by denying the record that God gives of his 
Son, there will come the sure and certain punishment of his unbelief, the 
reply is easy, that since punishment can come only in idea, and ideas, so 
far as we know, end with this life, there is little to fear, for since this life is 
but a dream, immortality is something still less substantial — even the 
dream of that dream. With the evidence of personal identity the evidence 
of personal immortality is lost also. 

So the Idealism of the present day tends to Solipsism which is mere self- 
deification on the one hand, or to Pantheism which is the abolition of all 
moral distinctions on the other. It is the natural recoil from Materialism, 
and yet it contains in itself germs of as great evil as did that foe with which 
the last generation so stoutly fought. It is the drift of our current philoso- 
phy, and the antagonist with which Christianity has to cope, and which 
Christianity will surely conquer, in the few decades to come. Sir William 
Hamilton opposed Idealism simply because he believed that it contradicted 
our consciousness and so destroyed the foundation of all knowledge and of 
all faith. And yet I know of no process of mere argument which to an 
idealistic skeptic will demonstrate that material substance exists. I can tell 
him that in his very perception of quality he intuitively cognizes substance ; 
but he may deny it. I can tell him that his ideas of the external world 
require a cause ; but he may refer me to God as their cause. I may say, 



74 MODERN IDEALISM. 

With Aristotle, that "things are not born of concepts;" but he may \"i&ly 
that to him this is the most intelligible explanation of the universe. When 
I come to the results of his doctrines in ethics, I may have greater hope of 
convincing him ; but even here I can make little progress, if he has blunted 
his conscience and schooled himself into a belief in determinism. Prac- 
tically I know of no better remedy for his disease than the acceptance of 
the Lord Jesus Christ. It is remarkable how the submission of the will to 
him as a divine Teacher, Savior, and Lord, results in a renewal and recre- 
ation of the will, — how the man who previously regarded himself as a victim 
of necessity, a mere waif swept upon the current, when once he has received 
the Savior into his heart, finds that he is now a free man, and becomes con- 
scious of his substantial manhood. For the first time he knows that he has 
a soul. And as at the Reformation those who had become skeptical of the 
existence of objective truth and righteousness, aye, even of the existence of 
God himself, when they once found by believing in Christ that they had 
God sure, proceeded to the discovery and recognition of objective realities 
outside of them and opened the way to the progress of modern science ; 
so now, in the individual heart, again and again, the reception of Chiist, 
giving the first sense of reality within, leads the soul outward to the recog- 
nition of a real world and of a real morality outside of it. So Christ is the 
way and the truth and the life, and he whom the Son makes free beamjia 
free indeed.* 



• Gunsaulus, Transfiguration of Christ, pp. 18, 19. 



VI. 

SCIENTIFIC THEISM/ 



It is my aim in this paper to discuss the possibility of a scientific theism, 
or in other words, the nature of our belief iu the existence of God, the 
sufficiency of the grounds upon which it rests, and the adequacy of this 
belief for the purposes of science. 

Mr. Huxley, if I mistake not, has discoursed pleasantly upon the absurd- 
ity of devoting any great share of our attention to lunar politics. But 
against selenology, or the science of lunar physics, he would probably urge 
no serious objections. The possibility of such a science he would admit to 
depend upon three things, first, the actual existence of such a body as the 
moon ; secondly, the fact that the human mind has powers which fit it for 
knowing the moon ; and thirdly, the provision of means by which the moon 
is brought into contact with the mind. The eye, or the telescope, or both, 
may bridge the gulf, and give us actual knowledge where there was only the 
possibility of knowledge before. A synthesis of the facts thus discovered, 
and the exhibition of them in their relations as parts of a system, might 
justly be called selenology. 

I use this illustration, not by any means to indicate the nature of our 
knowledge of God, but only to point out the natural conditions of it. As 
in the case just mentioned, a scientific theism is possible only upon condi- 
tion, first, that such a Being as God exists ; secondly, that the human mind 
has capacities for knowing God ; and thirdly, that God has been brought 
into intelligible contact with the human mind by revelation. If this revela- 
tion be an external one and assure us of facts which exist independently of 
our consciousness of them, we have in them the proper material for science ; 
and theology, in this department of it, does nothing more than put these 
facts in their appointed places, as the builders of Solomon's temple took the 
stones made ready to their hand and put them, without the sound of saw or 
hammer, into the places for which they had been designed by the architect. 

It is to the first of these conditions of a scientific theism, and to the first 
only, that I wish at present to direct attention. Does God exist? We find 
ourselves compelled at the very outset to define the term we use. What do we 
mean by God? By that name we designate not the abstract Absolute or In- 
finite of the metaphysicians, nor the necessarily developing life-principle of 
nature, to which the Pantheist holds, but rather the absolutely perfect 
Being — a Being whose very perfection involves a power of self -limitation 
— a Being who is absolute, not in the sense that he exists in no relation, but 
that he exists in no necessary relation; a Being who is infinite, not in the 



* An essay read before "The Club." Rochester, February 16, 1875. 



76 SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 

sense of excluding all coexistence of the Quite, but as constituting the 
ground and condition of the finite, so that nothing exists beside himself 
except by his sufferance or under his control. God is not all things, finite 
as well as infinite, material as well as spiritual, foolish as well as wise, 
unholy as well as pure. In one sense he is the most limited being in the 
universe, since he can never be otherwise than he is. But whatever limita- 
tions there are to his nature are imposed from within, never from without. 
That he cannot lie, or cease to be, is a part of his infinite perfection. 

God is the absolutely perfect Beiug, — but more than this must go to our 
definition, before it answers to our conception or becomes of practical use 
in our inquiry. By God, we mean not only a being who may exist in 
relation to the universe and to us, but a being who does exist in such 
relation. This Being whose perfection ans'vers to and transcends our high- 
est conceptions, and to whom we are notwithstanding so closely related, we 
recognize in three aspects : first, as a power above us upon which we are 
dependent; secondly, as an authority which imposes law upon our moral 
natures ; and thirdly, as a personality which we may recognize in prayer 
and worship. As we reflect upon the matter, we perceive that the spiritual 
energy of such a Being must be inexhaustible ; trying to find its bounds, we 
become speedily convinced that it reaches on and on forever ; immature 
thought may set limits here and there, or conceive of other like powers and 
personalties ; but more thorough investigation into the contents of our own 
conception assures us that this Being, whom we name God, is both infinite 
and one. 

The belief that such a Being as this exists, a Being upon whom we are 
dependent, to whom we are morally bound, whom we may address in prayer 
— a Being who, as Author, Lawgiver, End, answers to our highest notions 
of perfection — is in itself a remarkable fact. The idea of God, if it should 
be found in a single human mind, would deserve all attention. But it is 
found in many human minds — in so many human minds that we may 
characterize human nature, and difference it from the lower orders of 
intelligence, by its possession of this idea of God, just as truly as by its 
possession of the ideas of right and wrong. As this, however, is an impor- 
tant link in the discussion, and as it has been matter of controversy, let us 
ask explicitly to what extent, and in what sense, the belief in God's 
existence prevails among men. 

We are all aware that there are certain truths which men universally 
accept without thinking of putting them into words, and without always 
being able to understand them when propounded in scientific form. Men 
who have no notion what you mean when you say that there is a principle 
of causality, that every action implies an agent, every change an efficieney 
that produced it, still show their practical belief in the law of cause and ef- 
fect, by their language, actions and expectations. The formal denial of cer- 
tain truths does not by any means prove that men do not believe them. De- 
niers of freedom like necessitarians, of substance like idealists, of their own 
existence like nihilists, all practically acknowledge what they speculatively 
deny. Iu the case of the fatalist, all that is needed to show this is the 
knock-down argument. The fatalist, knocked down, rises to vow vengeance 
or sue for damages — that is, he holds his assailant responsible — that is, he 



SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 77 

recognizes, In practice, that the assailant's action is not necessitated but free. 
In judging of the evidence that the knowledge of God's existence is univer- 
sal, it is not necessary to require that each human being should, on interro- 
gation, respond that he knows that God exists. Though he may never have 
formulated his belief, he may still show by the language he employs, the 
actions he performs, and the expectations he cherishes, that he has the idea 
of a power above him on which he is dependent, an authority that binds his 
moral action, a personality whom he may address in prayer and worship. 

Certain beliefs, moreover, which belong to man as man are not developed 
In the earliest stages of the mind's growth, and that simply because the 
objects with which they have to do cannot be apprehended until the mind 
has reached a certain degree of intelligence. The moral ideas, for example, 
are apparently slumbering in the mind of the young child, but only because 
the notion of intelligent and voluntary action is not yet fully formed. The 
moment that conception is formed, you have with another knowledge of 
right and wrong, derived, not from any experience of utilities, but "from an 
original cognitive power of the mind. And even when once awakened, 
these beliefs are capable of indefinite education. They grow in strength 
and clearness. But the germ was there at the very beginning of the mental 
history, just as the full-grown apple existed in embryo even before the 
blossom had fallen from the tree. 

We should not therefore be warranted in denying the universality of the 
knowledge of God's existence, simply because we found that this knowledge 
existed in children and savages in a rudimentary and undeveloped form. 
The mere fact that the perfection ascribed to the Being above them does 
not answer to our ideas of perfection, or the range assigned to the divine 
attributes to our ideas of infinity, proves only that the child and the 
savage have not yet expounded to themselves the contents of their own 
notions, — it does not prove that they have no real idea of God. So long 
as there does exist the idea of a Being above, of greatness and perfectness 
answering to the highest conceptions of which the mind is at the time 
capable, the rudimentary nature of this knowledge should not blind us to 
the fact that it exists. 

With these precautionary suggestions, let us ask what is the exact state of 
the evidence with regard to the belief in God's existence. This is a matter 
of testimony. We find it to be simple historical fact, not only that the vast 
majority of men have actually believed in a God, but that there never has 
been an atheistic* age or an atheistic people. Men in the mass have every- 
where and always recognized a power, perfection, personality above them, 
though they have often clothed that power with wrong attributes. The race 
has bowed to priests more than it ever has to kings. The instinct of relig- 
ion has been stronger than the instinct of either government or society ; for 
religious ideas have dominated in the formation and progress of both. 
Deprive men of one religion, they seek another. Abandoning the old gods, 
they seek new. Even Comte and Mill cannot be content without something 
to worship, and the one must deify a woman, and the other universal 
humanity. 

Quatrefages, the French anthropologist, who has made this subject a mat- 
ter of special study, says distinctly that, "obliged as he has been, to pass 



78 NT1F1C THEISM. 

in review the race of meu, he has sought for atheism in the lowest and in 
the highest, but has nowhere met it except in an individual or at m 
some isolated school of philosophers ; everywhere and always." he 
"the masses of the people have escaped it." It is true that now and then 
reports are printed with regard to some savage tribe, like the Andaman 
Islanders, declaring that at last a people has been found who know no God. 
But closer examination has in most cases proved that those who seem at 
sight destitute of such a knowledge do really possess it. Ignorance of the 
language and of the mental and moral habitudes of a people very frequently 
leads to these superficial and incorrect judgments. Moffat, the missionary to 
Africa, declared that he had found tribes who had no religious rites and no 
belief in a power above them. But his son-in-law and successor, upon 
further investigation, showed th a judgment was based upon 

imperfect knowledge, and that these tribes had both ; Livingstone d> 
plainly, in so many words, that "the existence of a God and of a future life 
are universally recognized in Africa." 

It would be easy to multiply witnesses, but there is no need. We ar** 
mainly concerned with the exceptional cases. In what way shall we account 
for the fact that individuals are not rare who profess atheism? Or. granting 
that some tribe like the Andaman Islanders were to prove destitute of any 
clear conception of a supreme Being, how should we explain this? Upon 
the principles already laid down. Either they practically admit wfcal 
speculatively deny, or their minds are yet in a state like that of childhood, 
in which the intellectual faculties are not yet sufficiently developed to permit 
the awakening of this consciousness of God's existence. David Hume was a 
professed skeptic, yet, when walking in the fields with his friend Ferguson 
on a starlit night, he exclaimed, "Adam, there is a God!** Even the 
degraded tribes which we have mentioned do indirectly manifest in various 
ways the existence in their minds of the idea of God, an". influ- 

ence over them. The sense of responsibility, the notion of right and 
wrong, the reproaches of conscience, these are but reflections in the human 
soul of the authority and presence of God. Wherever there is fear after 
r doing, there is an implicit, if not explicit, recognition of the existence 
of One who hates the wrong and will punish the wrong. Bo far as e:: 
tion has yet gone, no tribe has been discovered that is utterly destitute of 
conscience. Until we learn of such, we must maintain that all men have, at 
least in germ and capable of development, the knowledge, of the existence 
of God. 

And this knowledge is certain to be developed so soon as the proper 
ns and conditions present themselves, that is, so soon as the mind 
devotes the requisite attention to the considerations which demand the idea 
of God for their explanation. In contemplating existence as finite, there is 
inevitably suggested to the mind the idea of an infinite Being. In danger, 
men instinctively cry to God for help. When we speak of this be! 
being universal we do not assert that the existence of God is a truth always 
present before the mind. It is possible to engross the mind with objects 
which do not call forth the belief. Men naturally avoid the occasions which 
suggest it. What we claim is simply this, that everywhere and alway-. 
when the proper occasion comes, and the facts which require it for their 



SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 79 

complement are presented to the mind, the knowledge of God's existence 
leaps forth from latency into power, — a storm at sea and the approach of 
death have dissipated many an atheistic delusion. It is this universal, 
though often unacknowledged, faith in the existence of a cause, a law, an end, 
above the merely transient and bounded beings which we see about us, that 
constitutes man's capacity for religion. Without this faith, there would be 
nothing to which religion could appeal. When we say that man is by nature 
a religious being, we offer the strongest proof that the knowledge of God's 
existence is universal. He who has not this knowledge, either potential or 
actual, may be idiot or brute, — he is not man. 

For this knowledge, universal in the sense we have mentioned, we have 
to account. What is its origin ? By what process have men everywhere 
acquired it? In attempting an answer to this question, it will be useful to 
review the various theories, and to pass rapid judgment upon them. First 
comes the theory which holds that the source of all our knowledge of God 
is external revelation, communicated to us either through the Scriptures 
or through tradition. It might be a sufficient reply to the first form of 
the theory — that which holds that we believe in a God because Scripture 
certifies us of his existence — to say that the belief in a God prevails to-day. 
and has prevailed for ages, where the Scriptures were never known. But 
it is a more vital objection still that the theory presupposes and takes for 
granted the very thing to be proved, namely, that God exists. Why do 
I believe in a God? Because the Bible tells me that he exists. Why do 1 
believe the Bible? Because I believe that a God exists who speaks authori- 
tatively in it. The Bible can be no authority to me, unless I have previous 
knowledge of the existence of a God from whom such a revelation can come. 
Just as a miracle cannot establish the divine existence, because it presup- 
poses it, so the Scriptures cannot establish the divine existence, because they 
presuppose it. And especially so with a revelation handed down from gen- 
eration to generation by word of mouth, — it cau have no power to convince 
me of God's existence, unless I have from some other source a previous 
knowledge of a God from whom such a revelation might come. To believe 
in God's existence upon the ground of revelation, and then to believe in rev- 
elation upon the ground of God's existence, is to argue in an incurably 
vicious circle. And yet to just this, amount all attempts to account from 
external influences for the belief in God. "Religion in the world is a delu- 
sion inspired and fostered by priests." "Fear produced the gods." But 
a uniform fact requires a uniform cause. Something in the nature of man 
leads him to religion — else there is nothing for education, culture, priest 
craft to work upon. Without such a demand in the nature, the religions of 
the world could never have been devised, received, believed, propagated. 
Some knowledge of a higher power must be presupposed to make either 
true or false priests possible. 

Or shall we say that the knowledge of God comes from experience, in the 
sense of Locke's philosophy? Locke, we remember, held that all our ideas 
came directly or indirectly from the senses. They were either notious of 
sensible and material objects, or, combinations of these formed by the mind 
itself. Can sense-perception or reflection, then, account for the idea of 
God? We must answer in the negative, for the idea of God is not that of a 



80 SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 

sensible or material object, nor is it a combination of sucb ideas. Since the 
spiritual and infinite are tbe direct opposites of the material and finite, no 
experience of the latter can account for our idea of the former. Does it 
help the matter to say that we know the existence of God from conscious- 
ness? No, because consciousness is only a con-knowing, an accompanying 
knowledge — a knowing of the mind's acts and states as its own. We are 
not properly conscious of facts or beings out of the mind. To say that we 
are conscious of the existence of God is simple tautology. It can mean 
only that we are conscious of knowing that God exists ; and the question as 
to the origin of this knowledge comes up as before. The Germans, indeed, 
use the term Gottesbewusstseiiij without being guilty of this tautology ; 
but only because this Gottesbewusstsein means, not 'consciousness of God,' 
but 'knowledge of God.' Bewusstscin is, not a 'con-knowing,' but a 'be- 
knowing.' 

Does the knowledge of God's existence, then, arise from reasoning? 
Since it is very frequently maintained that our belief has its source in argu- 
ment, it will be necessary to consider this view somewhat more at length. 
We may appeal here to our own mental history, while we confidently affirm 
that the rise of this knowledge in the great majority of minds is not the re- 
sult of any conscious process of reasoning. We say, in the great majority of 
minds. Some unquestionably do have this conviction wakened within them 
in the course of argumentative investigation, but even then the investiga- 
tion is commonly reckoned as the occasion, not the cause, of the new knowl- 
edge. Among men who reason about God, the majority do not rest their 
belief in his existence upon argument, any more than they rest upon argu- 
ment their belief in right and wrong. On the other hand, upon occurrence 
of the proper conditions, in hearing the thunder or being brought face to 
face with a past transgression, the conviction of God's existence flashes 
upon the soul with the quickness and force of an immediate revelation. 

If the belief in God's existence were the product of reasoning, it would 
seem that the strongest reasoners should be men of the strongest faith. But 
we all know that the strength of men's faith in that existence is not propor- 
tioned to the strength of the reasoning faculty. On the other hand men of 
greatest logical power are often inveterate skeptics, while men of unwaver- 
ing faith are found among those who cannot even understand the theistic 
arguments. Ask the mass of Christian people what is the foundation of 
their belief in God, and whatever else they may or may not say, they will 
refer its origin to anything but reasoning. The mass of Christians can no 
more follow the a priori or a posteriori arguments, than they can appre- 
ciate the demonstrations of a great physical truth like the shape of the 
moon's orbit, or the distance of the earth from the sun. Yet this does not 
prevent their having a knowledge of God. John, with his insight, has 
more faith than logical Thomas. And the converted barbarian has often a 
stronger conviction of God's existence than the undevout philosopher. 

But it is time to examine the arguments themselves. It is possible for us 
to overrate the value of mere argument, even to the minds that comprehend 
and conduct it. I believe that a careful review of the chief arguments for 
the existence of God will convince us that, valuable as they are for purposes 
to be shown hereafter, they are not sufficient of themselves to demonstrate 



SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 81 

the existence of the Being whom we call God. The arguments are four. 
Let us begin with the argument commonly called the Cosmological. This 
is not properly an argument from effect to cause; for the proposition that 
every effect must have a cause is simply identical, and means only that 
every caused event must have a cause. It is rather an argument from the 
contingent to the necessary, and may be stated as follows : Everything 
begun, whether substance or phenomenon, owes its existence to some pro- 
ducing cause. The universe is a thing begun, and owes its existence to a 
Cause which is equal to its production. And this miglity Cause must be 
God. 

Now the chief difficulty with this argument is in the minor premise. It 
cannot be shown that the universe, so far as its substance is concerned, has 
had a beginning. Hume urged, with reason, that we never saw a world made. 
Science knows nothing of the origin of substance. Creation is purely a 
truth of revelation. It is "through faith" that "we understand the worlds 
were made by the word of God, so that things that are seen are not made 
of things which do appear." But we cannot use Scripture in our argument. 
Aside from the Scriptures, we do not know that the world ever had a 
beginning. Many philosophers besides Hume, in Christian lands, and the 
prevailing opinion of ante-Christian times, have held that matter is eternal. 
Or do we mistake the principle of causality? Does that teach us, not that 
every begun thing, but that every thing, must have a cause? Then God 
himself must have been caused. No. Our principle is right. A cause is 
to be postulated only for what has clearly a beginning; but the universe, so 
far as jts substance is concerned, has no known beginning. 

But have the phenomena of the universe a beginning? Yes, we see 
changes which come and go with every passing day. Do they not require 
a cause? Yes, but even here it is difficult to show that any other cause is 
requisite than a cause within the universe itself — a cause such as the Pan- 
theist supposes. The Pantheist holds all change to be only modification of 
one universal, necessary, self -existent, eternal substance ; and the Cosmo- 
logical Argument alone cannot refute it. Or, if we grant that the universe 
has had a cause outside of itself, it is difficult to show that this cause has 
not itself been caused — that is, that it consists of an infinite series of 
dependent causes. And, if the cause of the universe has not itself been 
caused, it is impossible to show that this cause is not finite like the universe 
itself. We are warranted in assigning only a cause just sufficient to produce 
the effect. But what we know of the universe is finite. To say that it is 
infinite is pure assumption, — and it is of little use to assume an infinite to 
prove an infinite. From a finite effect, therefore, we can argue only a finite 
cause; and a merely finite cause cannot be God! 

The value of the Cosmological Argument is therefore simply this — it 
proves the existence of some Cause of the universe indefinitely great ; wlien 
we go beyond this, and ask whether this cause is a cause of being or merely 
a cause of change to the universe, whether it is a cause apart from the uni- 
verse or one with it, whether it is an eternal cause or a cause dependent 
upon some other cause, whether it is intelligent or unintelligent, infinite or 
finite, one or many, this argument cannot assure us. 

Let us consider, next in order, the Teleological Argument. This is not 
6 



82 SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 

properly an argument from design to a designer ; for that design implies a 
designer is simply an identical proposition. It may be more correctly stated 
as follows : Order and useful collocation, pervading a system, prove the 
existence of intelligence and purpose as the author of this order and collo- 
cation. Since order and useful collocation pervade the universe, there must 
exist an Intelligence adequate to the production of this order, and a Will 
adequate to direct this collocation to useful ends. This Intelligence and 
Will must be divine. There are certain common objections to the premises 
of this argument which are clearly invalid, — for example, the objection that 
order and useful collocation may exist without being purposed ; for we are 
compelled by our very mental constitution to deny this, where the order and 
collocation pervade a system. Nor is the objection that order and useful 
collocation may result from the operation of mere physical forces and laws 
any the more tenable, for the operation of physical forces and laws does not 
exclude but implies an originating intelligence and will. Before evolution, 
there must be involution. If anything is to come out, something must 
first be put in, — and if there is to be any certain progress to cosmos, instead 
of to chaos, there must be a guiding wisdom all along the line. 

That order and useful collocation do pervade the universe is assumed in 
science. The physical investigator could not proceed for a day without 
taking it for granted that the methods of nature are rational methods, that 
the properties and qualities of matter are uniform, that all things have their 
uses. Let science busy herself with the what, as much as she may ; it is the 
why, and the prudens qucestio with regard to it, that have been her most 
useful clues to nature's labyrinth ; and the scientific imagination which Prof. 
Tyndall lauds, is nothing else than insight into the thought and purpose of 
which nature is the embodiment. We have evidences of this order and use- 
ful collocation in the correlation of the chemical elements to each other ; 
sweep away all the proofs of intelligence in the existing universe ; pass over 
all the intervening history, — go back to the nebula if you will ; yet even 
here, an atom of oxygen is an atom of oxygen — an atom of hydrogen is an 
atom of hydrogen ; and in the fitness of both to combine, with results so 
wonderful, you have proof of a designing intelligence. And this same 
intelligence appears in the fitness of the inanimate world to be the basis and 
support of life ; in the typical forms and unity of plan apparent in the 
organic creation ; in the existence and cooperation of natural laws ; in cos- 
mical order and compensations — the precessions and retrograde movements 
that from age to age secure the safety of the system, even while they seem 
to threaten it. 

It does not invalidate the argument for intelligence to say that we often 
misunderstand the end actually subserved by natural events and objects; 
for the principle is, not that we necessarily know the actual end, but that we 
necessarily believe that there is some end, in every case of systematic order 
and collocation. Nor does it invalidate the argument to say that the order 
of the universe is manifestly imperfect; for this, if granted, would argue, 
not absence of contrivance, but some special reason for imperfection, either 
in the limitations of the contriving intelligence itself, or in the nature of the 
end sought. And just here Mr. Mill, in his posthumous essay on Theism, 
plants himself, and recognizing the blights and cruelties and devastations 



SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 83 

of nature, the hurricanes that destroy the fruits of man's labor, the beasts 
that live only by torturing and devouring others weaker than themselves, 
the thousand blossoms that perish for* the one that brings forth fruit, he 
declares that, if nature proves a God, it proves one who lacks either love or 
power; and, since there are signs of love, he who rules the universe must 
be a God in fetters — working with intractable material — bearing uphill & 
heavy burden that more than taxes his utmost strength. 

But Mr. Mill's conclusion is not the only one. The Pantheist's conclu- 
sion is just as logical as his. So long as there is such a thing as impersonal 
intelligence, and we see the bee building her hexagons and storing for the 
winter, yet without self-consciousness or freedom, but bound to lines of 
necessitated action by its very physical structure and conditions, why, s:iys 
the pantheist, may not the whole universe be only the unconscious work of 
a sublimer impersonal intelligence, that fashions forms of beauty and 
adaptation of means to ends, by an inexorable law of its own nature? And 
we must confess that either Mr. Mill's theory, or the theory of the pantheist, 
is logically consistent, and cannot be successfully combated upon the 
ground of the Teledlogioal Argument alone. Leave out of the estimate 
entirely the self -consciousness, moral ideas, and free will of man — and we 
cannot prove, either that God is absolute sovereign of the universe, or that 
an impersonal intelligence may not suffice for its production. And as this 
argument cannot prove personality or sovereignty in God, so it cannot 
prove unity, creatorship, eternity, or infinity. 

What then is its exact value? Simply this. It proves, from certain use- 
ful collocations and instances of order which have clearly had a beginning, 
or, in other words, from the present harmony of the universe, that there 
exists an intelligence and will adequate to its contrivance. But whether 
this intelligence and will are personal or impersonal, creative or fashioning, 
one or many, finite or infinite, eternal or owing their being to another, this 
argument cannot assure us. In it, however, we take a step forward. The 
causative Power, which we have proved by the Cosmological Argument, has 
now become an intelligent Power. 

The third argument is commonly called the Moral, though we should 
prefer to call it the Anthropological Argument. It is an argument from the 
mental and moral constitution of man to the existence of a divine Author, 
Lawgiver, and End. Man's intellectual and moral being have had a 
beginning upon the planet. Material and unconscious forces do not afford 
a sufficient cause for his reason, conscience, and free will. As an effect, 
therefore, man can be referred only to a cause possessing self-consciousness 
and a moral nature, or in other words, personality. This is the first part 
of the argument. It is held to prove a divine Author of man's higher 
being. But there is a second part which argues from the existence of man's 
moral nature to the existence of a holy Lawgiver and Judge. Conscience 
recognizes the existence of a moral law which has supreme authority. 
Known violations of this moral law are followed by feelings of ill desert and 
fears of judgment. But this moral law, since it is not self-imposed, and 
these threats of judgment, since they are not self-executing, respect- 
ively argue the existence of a holy Will that has imposed the law, and 
of a punitive Power that will execute the threats of the moral nature. 



84 SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 

•Bat why," says Murphy, ''should we suppose conscience to be the w 
a will, or personal authority? Why should we suppose conscience to be 
anything more than the voice of impersonal reason, when it speaks on the 
subject of duty?" And Murphy answers his own question as follows: 
Because "unlike impersonal abstract reason, conscience speaks with a 
command. Reason speaks in the indicative mood : conscience in the 
imperative. The intuitions cf the reason do not come into consciousness 
as if made known by»a voice, but rather as knowledge comes through the 
eye, and do not suggest personality in their origin. A voice of command, on 
the contrary, at least suggests personality in its origin. It is this proof that 
has had greatest effect on mankind. "The heavens declare the glory of 
God," — but they declare it only to those who believe in God. The light from 
the heavens is really the reflected light of conscience, though men often 
mistake its origin." 

But beyond this, and as the third part of the Moral Argument, man's 
emotional and voluntary nature proves the existence of a Being who can 
furnish in himself a satisfying objeet of human affection, and an end which 
will call forth man's highest activities and ensure his highest progress. 
Only a Being of power, wisdom, holiness and goodness, and all these 
indefinitely greater than any that we know upon earth, can meet this 
demand of the human soul. Such a Being must exist. Otherwise man's 
greatest need would be unsupplied, and belief in a lie be more productive 
of virtue than belief in the truth. 

Such is a strong statement of the Moral Argument. Its defects are that 
it cannot prove a creator of the material universe ; nor can it prove the 
infinity of God. since man from whom we argue is simply finite. Its value 
is that it assures us of the existence of a personal Being, who rules us in 
righteousness, and who is the proper object of supreme affection and 
service. Among the arguments for the existence of God, however, we give 
to this the chief place, since it adds to the idea of causative Power (which 
was derived from the Cosmological Argument", and of contriving Intelligence 
h was derived from the Teleological ) . the far wider ideas of Personality 
and righteous Lordship. 

These arguments are the only ones to which we can assign any logical 
value as proving the existence of a Being above us whom we can in anj- 
sense call God. The Ontological or a priori Argument, from the abstract 
and necessary ideas of the human mind, has had currency in past ages, but 
is now generally abandoned. Because I have the idea of an absolutely 
perfect Being, it does not follow that that Being exists. If it were so. 
Kant's analogous argument might be valid: because I have a perfect idea 
of a hundred dollar bill, it would follow that I actually possessed one. which 
is far from being the case. And so we may come to a conclusion from the 
arguments as a whole. It appears that the a priori argument is capable 
of proving only an abstract and ideal proposition, but can never conduct us 
to the existence of real being. It appears that the arguments a posteriori 
which we have considered in detail, since they are arguments from merely 
finite existence, can never demonstrate the existence of the infinite. In the 
words of Sir Wm. Hamilton: "A demonstration of the absolute from the 
relative is logically absurd ; as. in such a syllogism, we must collect in the 



SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 83 

Conclusion what is not distributed in the premises." And the same consid- 
erations apply to the attempt to explain our knowledge of God as an infer- 
ence from the facts of nature or of mind, — for either this inference is what 
is called in logic "an immediate inference," and so is a mere restatement in 
other words of some proposition with regard to the finite and is not a process 
of reasoning at all, — or it is a process of reasoning, and so is only a 
condensed deductive syllogism, which, because it is condensed, may be 
expanded into regular syllogistic form. In this case, since it is a process 
of reasoning, it is open to the objections which have been previously 
mentioned. 

But to all arguments for the existence of God, we have a still more radical 
objection to urge, namely that all reasoning presupposes the existence of 
God as its logical condition and foundation. Not only does the trustworthi- 
ness of the simplest mental acts, such as sense-perception, self-conscious- 
ness and memory, depend upon the assumption that a God exists who has so 
constituted our minds that they give us knowledge of tilings as they are; 
but the more complex processes, such as induction and deduction, can be 
relied upon only by presupposing a thinking Deity, who has made the 
various parts of the universe to correspond to each other and to the investi- 
gating faculties of man. Upon what warrant do I perform the simplest act 
of induction, and infer from one or more particular instances a truth 
universal in its nature? What right have I to conclude, from two or three 
facts within my observation, that unsupported bodies always fall, and that 
fire burns, and arsenic kills? Only upon the ground that the universe is a 
solidarity, that part corresponds to part, that laws of nature here are also 
laws of nature there, that there is a thought running through the universe, 
and that there is a thinker who thinks that thought. In the words of Dr. 
Paabody: "Induction is a syllogism with the immutable attributes of God 
for a constant term." Or as Dr. Porter expresses it: "Induction rests 
upon the assumption, as it demands for its ground, that a personal or 
thinking Deity exists." It has no meaning or validity, unless we assume 
that the universe is so constituted as to presuppose an absolute and uncon- 
ditioned Originator of its forces and laws. And, as all deduction rests 
upon previous processes of induction or upon the intuitions of space and 
time, it follows that every sort and kind of reasoning toward the existence 
of God actually presupposes that existence, and begs the whole question in 
the very attempt to prove it. 

Much new light is thrown from this point back upon our arguments for 
God's existence. We see that it is impossible to argue from man's wants to 
a supply, impossible to argue from conscience to a lawgiver, impossible to 
argue from adaptation in nature to a designing intelligence, without taking 
for granted that indications do not deceive us — that there is a correlation 
between the human mind and the universe, as well as between the human 
mind and the divine. Imagine an evil being to sit upon the throne of the 
universe, and to constitute all things so as to falsify our observations, 
expectations and reasonings, and all our arguments yield no fruit. It is 
because we take for granted that God is, that he exists in truth and right- 
eousness, that the rational methods of the divine mind bear analogy to our 
own, that we are made in God's image, — it is because of these assumptions, 






S6 SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 

that any theism or any science is possible. In other words, we cannot 
demonstrate that God is, but we can show that in order to the existence of 
any other knowledge, men must assume that God is. 

But a knowledge thus fundamental, necessary and universal, we call an 
intuitive knowledge. Of this sort we consider the knowledge of God's 
existence. We hold God's existence to be a first truth, like the conviction 
of our own personal existence, or the belief in causality, or the knowledge 
of substance as the reality in which attributes inhere and find their unity. 
But we hold this truth to be a deeper and more fundamental truth than 
any one of the others we have mentioned, and for that very reason the easiest 
to overlook and the last to be formulated. It is a knowledge which logically 
precedes all observation and all reasoning. — yet only reflection upon the 
phenomena of nature and of mind occasions its rise in consciousness. There 
is a prejudice against the doctrine of intuitive knowledge of any kind which 
arises too frequently from an imperfect conception of what is meant by an 
intuition. When we say that God is known intuitively, we do not hold that 
this knowledge will develop itself apart from observation and experience, 
but only that it will develop itself upon occasion of observation aud experi- 
ence. A first truth is a knowledge, which, though developed upon occasion 
of sense-perception and reflection, is not derived from these, — a knowledge 
which on the contrary has such logical priority that it must be assumed or 
supposed to make either sense-perception or reflection possible. Such 
truths are therefore not recognized first in order of time ; some of them are 
assented to somewhat late in the mind's growth ; by the great majority of 
men they are never consciously formulated at all. Yet they constitute the 
necessary assumptions upon which all other knowledge rests, and the mind 
has not only the inborn capacity to evolve them so soon as the proper 
occasions are presented, but the recognition of them is inevitable so soon .as 
the mind begins to give account to itself of its own knowledge. 

The doctrine of this paper, therefore, is that all men have at the very 
basis of their being, and as the deepest principle of all their thinking, a 
knowledge of the existence of God, as a Power upon which they are 
dependent, a Perfection which imposes law on their moral natures, and a 
Personality which they may address in prayer and worship. It is a knowl- 
edge, however, which more than any other has been dimmed and obscured 
by transgression, and by the loss of that love to God which is the condition 
of its clearest and strongest exercise. In an unfallen state, we may believe 
that it manifested itself as naturally and spontaneously as the intuition of 
self does now. God was seen in all things, and all things were seen in God. 
With the exercise of this intelligence, there was also the knowledge of affec- 
tion and communion. But with sin, the knowledge of friendship and man- 
ifestation ceased, and only the necessary and intuitive remained. There is 
no longer an extensive knowledge of the divine attributes — no longer a 
seeing God face to face, only the cold, blank apprehension of fear, and the 
effort to rid the soul of the thought of God. But still in every mind the 
knowledge remains. It is dim, yet it burns — a light ready to flame forth 
in time of danger, or sinning, or judgment. It is like a choked-up well 
from which you have only to remove the debris, and the water that has been 
flowing so long in secrecy and silence can be seen once more aud drawn up 
to qiiemli the thirst. 



SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 67 

And this is the object of God's twofold revelation in nature and In th« 
Scriptures. Arguments drawn from nature and the human mind awaken, 
confirm and enlarge a conviction of God's existence, which may have been 
slumbering for lack of reflection. Arguments can never conduct us to God. 
or account for our idea of God. Both ends of the ladder are wanting. The 
top does not reach to heaven, since argument can give us not the infinite 
but only the finite. The foot has no firm basis on the earth, since all logic 
presupposes the existence of God and without this is invalid. Arguments 
cannot conduct us to God. They are not the bridge itself — they are only 
the guys that steady and strengthen it. Intuition is the great suspension- 
bridge that spans the gulf. The arguments are indeed only the efforts of 
the mind that already has a conviction of God's existence to give to itself a 
formal account of its belief. As such they will always be helps to faith, 
and means of bringing out into clearer light the deliverances of our inmost 
nature. This intuitive knowledge the Scriptures always take for granted. 
They never attempt to prove the existence of God. They address men as 
already knowing it. They bring a new revelation of the grace of God, and 
promises of a special work of God's Spirit, to turn this knowledge, which 
now is only a knowledge of intellect and of fear, into the knowledge of 
assured friendship and of sacred communion. Only in Christ are we 
brought back to our lost sonship and made possessors of that saving knowl- 
edge which is identical with eternal life. 

But is a knowledge like this adequate to the purposes of science? When 
we know God by intuition, have we a right to use the materials thus gath- 
ered as foundation stones of theology? Herbert Spencer denies it, upon 
the ground that this intuition is, like all the rest, a mere accretion of past 
experience, a hereditary tendency of thought, a result of multitudes of sense- 
perceptions and awe-stricken feelings of past generations — transcendental for 
the individual but empirical for the race, a representation after all of the tran- 
sient and earthly, a representation that in time may be outgrown. But this 
theory can be maintained only by wholly mistaking the nature and contents 
of the intuition itself. It is not merely a hereditary tendency, like that of 
the brutes, for the brutes have no intuitions — least of all, the intuition of a 
God. It is the intuition not of the finite or of the indefinite, but of the 
positively infinite ; and this, as we have seen, can in no manner be derived 
from experience, either in the present or the past. Just as the idea of right 
and wrong can be explained by no combination of utilities, aud the idea of 
cause by no combination or uniformity of sequences, and the idea of 
material or spiritual substance by no succession of seusatious, so the idea 
of the infinite cannot be explained by any combinations or successions of 
the finite. For the very reason that it is too great an idea for so mean an 
origin, Herbert Spencer is obliged to reduce its scale in his representations 
of it, until it is small enough to be reasonably supposed to have emerged 
from the narrow aperture of sense. In other words, the intuition of God, 
and all the other intuitions, are explained by simply denying their existence. 
The trick is too old a one, and too fatal to Mr. Spencer's own system. For, 
if the validity of causation aud of logical laws and of our knowledge of God 
be denied, what rule can save Mr. Spencer's belief in the Unknowable and 
in the Persistence of Force, the corner-stones of his philosophy, since these 



88 SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 

are not truths of experience but postulates of the reason? And whither la 
philosophy tending, if the most fundamental knowledges of all, which it has 
taken uncounted ages to build up and consolidate, are to be proved utterly 
invalid by the latest research? In this doctrine, we have the reductio ad 
absurdum of the Spencerian philosophy. Evolution is proved to be a 
progress from knowledge to ignorance, from certainty to doubt. With the 
sweeping away of a single intuition, all the rest must also perish, for the 
mind certifies to none if not to all, and with them Herbert Spencer too, with 
his philosophy, must be consigned to the abyss of absolute skepticism. 

There is another denial which we must mention — that of Sir William 
Hamilton. He virtually ruled our conviction of God's existence out of the 
realm of science by calling it faith, and then defining faith as that organ of 
the mind by which we apprehend that which is not an object of knowledge. 
Of course, if God is not an object of knowledge, then science, which is 
knowledge, cannot have theism for one of its departments. Now we accept 
the title of faith for the peculiar apprehension which we have of God. Not- 
withstanding this, we claim that this faith furnishes proper material for 
science. And that, simply for the reason that faith is not mere opinion or 
imagination, but a higher kind of knowledge. All physical science rests 
upon faith, faith in human testimony and in our primitive cognitions, but is 
not invalidated thereby. And why? Simply because this faith, though 
unlike sense-perception or logical deduction, is yet a cognitive act of the 
reason. Faith, in this lower sense, may be defined as certitude with regard 
to matters in which verification is unattainable. If the intuition of God is 
to be excluded from the realm of science because it is faith, then by the 
same rule must the doctrine of the uniformity of nature and the facts 
received upon human testimony be excluded from science also. Faith in 
God's existence is indeed a faith of higher rank than these, but it follows 
the same rule. The faith which constitutes the source of truth with regard 
to God is simply a certitude with regard to spiritual realities, upon the tes- 
timony of our rational nature and upon the testimony of God. The only 
feature that differences it from the lower faiths of science is the fact that it 
is conditioned upon the presence of a holy affection toward God. Yet even 
here we are not without analogies. There is a knowledge of the beautiful 
which is conditioned upon a love for beauty. Only one who loves beauty 
i an ever see it, whether in sunset sky or on the poet's page. There is a 
knowledge of the morally good which is conditioned upon love for the mor- 
ally good. Only one who loves moral excellence can recognize it in char- 
acter, or truly set forth its principle and nature. So there is a knowledge 
of God which is conditioned upon love for God. Only one who loves God 
can see God or truly know God. As the sciences of aesthetics and ethics 
respectively are products of reason, but of reason as including in the one 
ease a power of recoguizing beauty practically inseparable from a love for 
beauty, and on the other hand a power of recognizing the morally ri^lit 
practically inseparable from a love for the morally right, so a scientific 
theism is a product of reason, but of reason as including a power of recog- 
nizing God practically inseparable from a love for God. This cognitive act 
of the reason by which we apprehend God, under the condition of a holy 
affection toward God. is faith. As an operation of man's higher rational 



SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 89 

nature, though distinct from ocular vision or from reasoning, It is a kind of 
knowledge, and so may furnish proper material for a scientific theism. 

A single question yet remains. If this right affection toward God be a 
condition of all scientific knowledge of him, in what sense can those who 
have no such affection know God, and what claim can such theism have 
upon them, since they lack the affectional conditions which alone can enable 
them to understand it? We answer that all men have a knowledge of God, 
dimmed and obscured though it be. A thorough and clear and vivid acquaint- 
ance with the truth, however, belongs only to those who look through eyes 
of love, and have their vision purged with the "euphrasy and rue" of divine 
revelation. But we can better answer by a parablp. A certain man afflicted 
with cataract still perceived faint rays of light piercing the curtain that ever 
hung before him. He could tell daylight from dark, and the comparative 
dimness of his dwelling from the brightness of the outer world. One of his 
sons was an optician, and another was a painter. The father tried to under- 
stand their work and to help them in it, but he could not. What could the 
blind man know of lenses or of colors? At last he began to deny that there 
was any such thing as optics, or any such thing as painting. His sons 
vainly argued with him. They urged that the little light that reached his 
retina should be evidence to him that something existed outside of and beyond 
his eyes ; that he ought to take their word for it that they saw shape and 
beauty where none appeared to him ; that whole sciences had been constructed 
out of simple matters of form and light ; that, with the cataract removed, he 
might see it all, and know it all, for himself. But the old man had been 
born blind; he believed nothing; he had no trust in oculists, as he had no 
trust in science ; the veil before him grew thicker and his skepticism more 
inveterate, till at last with neither eyes nor mind could he see at all. Was 
there, therefore, no science of painting or of optics? and had these sciences 
no claim upon him? 



VII. 

THE WILL ffl THEOLOGY, OR, AN EARLIER VIEW OF 
THE WILL.* 



We purpose in this paper to discuss the subject of the Will and its rela- 
tions to Theology. Philosophy has no more difficult problem than this with 
which to deal. All agree that consciousness testifies to human freedom. 
But when this consciousness is to be interpreted, we find division. Some 
look so exclusively to the uniformities of man's action, that they settle down 
into determinism; freedom, to them, is but the seeming self-movement of 
the summer cloud, which is borne onward by forces external to it, and is 
driven by atmospheric currents even when it appears to be following an 
impulse of its own. Others eye so closely the central source of power within 
us. that they lose sight of the laws under which that power is exerted, and 
identify freedom with caprice; to them no act can be free which is the inva- 
riable sequence of fixed motive, and God cannot be free unless he is able 
to sin. 

Fatalism and arbitrariness — these are the two extremes between which 
tbe pendulum of thought is ever swinging. Both of these extremes are 
represented in the schools of to-day. And let us frankly acknowledge that 
each has had its devoted adherents because each is the exaggeration and per- 
version of a truth. That is an easy philosophy which accepts the one and 
iguores the other, but it is as shallow and false as it is easy. It is a harder 
task to analyze both, and. after having set aside their elements of error, to 
combine what remains of truth into one consistent whole. But something 
like this must be done by every thinking man if he would attain to mental 
quiet, while to the preacher not only a consistent but a correct view of the 
will is indispensable if he would present the gospel with completeness and 
power. 

And yet our method of investigation should not be the method of eclecti- 
cism. We may be taught by the past to avoid the errors of the past, but a 
clear and satisfactory result can only be attained by the new examination of 
the facts of consciousness, with the added help of Christian experience and 
of Scripture. We are not novices enough to believe that we can clear up all 
the dark places of this most intricate theme. We do believe, however, that 
the main features of a right doctrine of The will may be discovered and inTel- 
ligibly set forth. Error has commonly arisen because inquirers have started 
from a priori and abstract notions of liberty or of law, rather than from 
induction of the facts of man's actual condition according to conscience and 



* Printed in the Baptist Review. 1880: 527-530, and 1SS1 : 30-41 

90 



THE WILL IN THEOLOGY. 91 

the r.ible. Let our first aim, then, be this, to examine the facts, both as 
n gards the ordinary operations of our willing faculty, and as regards its con- 
duct in matters of morality and religion. Then, secondly, we may test the 
results thus obtained by their conformity or non-conformity with certain 
great general teachings of Scripture respecting God and man. Finally, we 
may inquire whether the objections frequently urged against our view are of 
sufficient force to compel its surrender, or can be met by counterbalancing 
considerations if not by direct refutation. 

In asking what are the farts of the will's action, the simplest cases are the 
most typical and the most instructive. The other day I found my little son 
executing some curious gyrations about the room. "John." I said, "what 
do you do that for?" "Oh. I do it because I want to, father!" was his 
reply. Now my question and his answer give a complete formula for a 
doctrine of the will. I will take them for my text in what follows. The 
text teaches us that the human mind is the efficient cause of its own action. 
"1 do it." John refers his action to himself as its author. And when we 
speak of John's will, we have nothing in mind but John himself, as a person 
putting forth power. 

Let us observe a little more closely what John's attributing to himself 
power involves. It involves a consciousness on his part that his willing is 
determined by nothing outside himself. He knows that when he turns a 
somersault, he is not a water-wheel set a going and kept a going by an exter- 
nal force. It is he, in whom the effort and the motion originate. Here we 
get a glimpse of the indestructible barrier in human consciousness against 
all schemes of materialistic necessity. Man is not the product of climate and 
surroundings. External things cannot account for his volitions. The spring 
of action is within. His whole mental being rises up in protest against the 
doctrine that he acts only as he is acted upon, that his mental movement is 
determined for him by causes apart from himself and beyond his control. 
He knows that he is free, in the sense that he determines himself, and is the 
efficient cause of his own activities. 

Absence of outward constraint then is only a part, and a small part, of the 
idea of liberty. Movement from within belongs to it also. John can say : 
"I do it," not only with regard to his bodily activity but with regard to the 
inward effort of his soul. His body may be in fetters, but his soul may be 
free. Even in confinement he may put forth mental powers in longing for 
deliverance or in planning an escape. The freedom of the will is shown in 
choice rather than in the execution of the choice. It is indeed this inward 
realm of mental energy to which we need to confine our attention. Not 
freedom in acting, but freedom in choosing is the inalienable prerogative of 
will. Take from me the power of originating bodily action, and I am still 
man. with mind unconquered and directing a thousand operations within. 
But take from me the power of originating mental action and I cease to be a 
rational creature, — I become as much a prey to influences from without as 
the stick or the stone. We call this freedom formal freedom, because it 
belongs to us as the very form of our being. So long as man is man. be 
cannot be divested of it. Hear John Calvin declare his faith in it: "I 
acknowledge," he says, "and I will always affirm, that there is a free-will, a 
will determining itself, and I proclaim any man who thinks otherwise a 



02 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY. OR, 

heretic. Lot the will be called free, because it is not constrained or Impelled 
irresistibly from without, but determines itself by itself." 

Thus my son's reply: "I do it," indicates his consciousness that his will, 
or his mind willing, is the efficient cause of his inward, and so of his out- 
ward, activity. But my question and the remaining words of his answer in- 
dicate also another complementary fact in his consciousness. I ask him: 
"What do you do that for?" He recognizes the propriety of the question, 
and replies: "Oh, I do it because," — and then follows an assigned reason. 
Now this shows that while the will is an efficient cause of mental action, it 
is never an adequate or sufficient cause. In other words, the will never acts 
without some material to work upon, some reason for its activity, some end 
in view. This is little more than a repetition of those old maxims in philos- 
ophy: "An act of pure will is unknown in consciousness;" "Willing must 
have some object;" "He that wills must will something." Dr. H. B. 
Smith has well illustrated the difference between an efficient cause and an 
adequate cause, by the activity of the laborers in the building of a house. 
This activity is the efficient cause of the building, but it is not an adequate 
cause. Besides this there must be a material cause, in the shape of brick 
and mortar, and a final cause, in the end which the house is designed to sub 
serve. So to call the will an efficient cause is by no means to say that mere 
will can account for any action whatever. There must be occasion for its 
activity and reasons for its effort. No power was ever put forth by any will, 
human or divine, with regard to which we cannot ask the question: "Why?" 
and with regard to which we cannot compel from the willing agent the an- 
swer: "Because." The real cause of an action is made up of two things: 
first, the power that did it, and secondly, the reason for which it was done. 
Or, to put it more philosophically, the adequate or sufficient cause is a com- 
bination of two elements: first, the efficient cause; and secondly, the occa- 
sional cause. 

If the adequate cause of an action or volition be not a simple but a com- 
plex thing, we can see why one action or volition should be unlike another. 
The efficient cause, the will, is the same in both, but the occasional cause, 
the reason or end in view, is different. The fact that I have a will explains 
the fact of my willing, but it does not explain the fact that I will this rather 
than that. Particularity in the effect demands particularity in the cause. 
When I ask what is the cause of the uniformity of evil action in the case of 
an individual or of the race, it is not enough to tell me that the individual 
has a will, and that each member of the race has a similar faculty of voli- 
tions. I demand to know why this faculty acts wrongly with such persist- 
ent uniformity. When I ask the secret of a pure and consistent life, I feel 
it an impertinence to be told simply that the man who leads that life chooses 
to live as he does. The everlasting "why?" comes up again and again 
until it is answered. And when the advocates of arbitrariness declare that 
"nothing .whatever" causes one man to put forth continuously selfish voli- 
tions and another man to put forth continuous efforts of self-sacrifice, I feel 
myself disingenuously dealt with, and I declare that such a theory of the 
will wrecks itself upon the soild rock of our primitive conviction that every 
effect must have an adequate and sufficient cause. 

My son John not only assents to this principle at once by saying: "Be- 



AN EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. 93 

cause, " but he throws great light upon the nature of human volition, by 
saying: " Because 1 want to!" He asserts implicitly that want, desire, dis- 
position, account for mental act or effort. He declares tbat while the ego, 
the will, is the efficient cause of his action a certain wish, preference, affec- 
tion of his is the cause which determines the specific character of the action. 
Now this is simply to say that every volition has its motive; that no act of 
will is ever put forth except in accordance with the soul's prevailing desire 
at the time the choice is made. Certainly, if a man has power to act with- 
out motives, it is a power which is never exercised, and we can have no sci- 
entific warrant for claiming its existence. Action without motive is irration- 
al. What dignity or value is there in a wild contingency which may act unin- 
telligently to its own ruin? This is caprice and craziness, but not freedom. 
It is immoral as well as irrational. You require that men shall choose for 
reasons, not without reason. Only as you assume that there was a motive 
behind the deed, do you regard the agent responsible. To maintain that In 
determinedness is essential to liberty, to declare that in order to freedom 
man must have the power of acting contrary to all motives and of doing what 
on the whole he does not wish to do, is to contradict all experience and con- 
sciousness. Power to do what one docs not desire to do, is not power, but 
impotence. Power to plunge into the abyss of sin, in spite of all inward 
tendencies to the good, only indicates that the soul has not yet reached true 
freedom. Freedom never shows itself except in the choice of what we like. 
When the love for honor is so strong that a man cannot do a dishonorable 
act, then he is most truly free. God cannot lie, but the settled love for 
truth that renders lying forever impossible to him does not abrogate his free- 
dom. The truest freedom in God, and in the just made perfect, is identical 
with necessity. In short, I am free only when I act from motives and do 
what I want to. 

But you observe that when John says "Because I want to," the motive of 
which he speaks is something internal and not external. Unless we stead- 
fastly maintain this, we shall be avoiding the Charybdis of caprice only to 
fall upon the Sc3'lla of fatalism. Let us remember that all motive, in the 
last analysis, is within. Suppose you offer to George Washington a million 
in gold, as the price of betraying his country. Will he accept it? No. But 
Benedict Arnold will. The gold is the same in both cases. What makes it 
a motive in the one case, and not in the other? Why, evidently, the settled 
preferences, affections and desires, which constitute the character of each. 
Thus we see that the causes of volitions lie, after all, wholly within the 
mind. Outward things have value and attractiveness, only as the mind seizes 
upon them with its desires, only as they are the objects £>£ some want within. 
What we mean by the strongest motive is simply the bent of the mind, the 
fundamental and ruling preference. And in matters of morals and religion, 
this fundamental and ruling preference is of one or another sort, either a 
supreme love for self or a supreme love for God. Of whichever sort it is. 
it is the man's inmost condition and character ; in short, it is the man him- 
self. When his will acts, it acts under the influence of motives, but it is 
the character that makes the motives, and so we may truly say that the 
will always manifests the character. The inward affections which consti- 
tute the character may be so strong and fixed that the acts which take their 



94 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, OR. 

direction from them are uniformly good or bad. The immanent preference 
or moral bias of the soul may be so holy that a being cannot sin, or may 
be so unholy that a being cannot but sin, and yet this certainty of good or 
evil action may be the result of no outward constraint whatever. The will 
may be perfectly free, while yet the direction and form of the volitions are 
determined by the inward character. 

Thus far I have spoken of the will as if it were simply the faculty of voli- 
tions. I have not thought it expedient to encumber my statement of the 
elements of the doctrine by anticipating the profoumler and more unfamiliar 
phases of the will's activity. When we come to consider the will in its 
moral and religious aspects, we find that it fills a range of our being very 
commonly ignored, but far more extensive and important than that of mere 
volition. John intimates this when he says: " I want to." That is as much 
as to say that the person John puts forth another power than that of actual 
volition — namely, a power of wish, preference, desire. There is difference 
between these and volitions. The latter we are conscious of originating; 
we are not always conscious of originating the former. We put forth the 
volition; we find ourselves wishing. And yet we use not the passive but 
the active voice; we say: "7 wish. I want. I prefer." We call our dispo- 
sitions and affections voluntary, though we never speak of voluntary knowl- 
edge. The more we think of this underlying region in which motive chiefly 
originates, the more we see that here is the heart, the true self, here the 
most intimate going-forth of power. We perceive that there are optative 
states as well as optative acts, and that we hold others and ourselves respon- 
sible for them, in a way which would not be possible if the will did not con- 
sciously or unconsciously enter into them as a constitutive element. In 
short we come to see that to define will as mere faculty of volitions is to 
regard only the most superficial aspects of it, while it is really nothing less 
than the whole principle of mental movement, conscious or unconscious, the 
whole impulsive power of man's being, whether latent or developed, and in 
its moral and religious aspects, the whole tendency and determination of the 
soul to an ultimate end. 

Will, then, in the sense of the faculty of volitions, is always backed and 
preceded by will in the larger and profounder sense of the immanent pref- 
erence of the soul, the moral gravitation of the dispositions and affections, 
in fine, the character of the man. So that we properly comprehend in the 
range of the will not only the executive acts, but also the settled appetencies 
in which the person puts forth power. The desires and longings of the soul 
are states of the will, and for them as constituting our inmost character, we 
feel ourselves chiefly responsible. I cannot separate myself from these inner 
impulsions. I cannot sunder the faculty of volitions from the directive 
powers beneath, simply because I cannot escape from myself. If these pow- 
ers are evil in their tendency and product, I accuse myself as thus evil. 
When I see consummate pride and haughtiness in others, I condemn it 
because it is a tendency of soul that is wicked, whether originated by the 
individual's volition or not. There is a congenital and hereditary egotism 
and self-assertion, and we reprobate it without respect to its origin, because 
we feel that the "territory of vice and of virtue," to use the words of 
another, "is as wide as the mind exercised either voluntary or optativ« ly. ' 



AX EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. i»j 

Many of our dispositions and desires are but imperfectly conscious. Some 
of them we are probably altogether unconscious of. until sonio onexpeote l 
emergency reveals our character in action ; but the whole stream of moral 
tendency, even apart from and below consciousness, is in the realm of the 
voluntary, belongs in this large sense to will, and involves responsibility 
and guilt if it be evil, as it is worthy of love and approbation when good. 

If you have followed me thus far you will be able to see how freedom of 
the will may be perfectly compatible with the certainty, in any particular 
case, of a definite kiud of action. The will as a faculty of volitions is an 
efficient cause, a causa causa ns, acting from within by a power of its own. 
But the will in this narrow sense is under law to the will in the larger and 
deeper sense, and the will in this last sense is a causa causata ; the indi- 
vidual can never point to a particular volition of his own which caused his 
character. He causes, and he is caused. He determines, but he finds him- 
self determined. He acts freely, but the direction of his acts is furuished 
by a voluntary nature that stretches away beneath his consciousness. He 
is a swimmer in the stream, but the current is strong, and the current is 
not something foreign to him — it is his real self, as much as his conscious 
efforts are. While no restraint whatever is laid upon him, there may be the 
most perfect certainty that he will act in one way rather than in another. 
The mean person may be incapable of generosity and the truthful person 
incapable of falsehood, because each freely acts out his character. In each 
case there is a moral necessity which is perfectly consistent with freedom. 
The formal freedom of the will, considered as the faculty of volitions, may 
still subsist, while yet the will considered as the underlying movement and 
current of the voluntary being is in bondage by reason of perverse and 
unnatural tendencies and inclinations. And this is the real condition of 
man — formal freedom, but a real necessity of evil — a necessity of evil, 
however, very different from the necessitarianism maintained by the mate- 
rialist, which has its ground in things external to human nature — a neces- 
sity of evil which has its ground rather in man himself, and in those evil 
dispositions and desires which are states of his wiii, and which were caused 
by human nature itself when it first fell away from God and from holiness. 

Ernest Naville has well said that man cannot cease to believe in liberty, 
because it is his true nature, nor can he cease to doubt his liberty, because he 
does not realize it. Put these two facts together, and you will avoid both the 
extremes of controversy. The will, as a power of putting forth individual 
choices, can choose anything not inconsistent with its previous fundamental 
choice or preference. Hence we grant what the old theologians call civil 
freedom. Every man chooses unrestrainedly the method in which he will act 
out his character. A thousand forms of activity are open to him. In any 
one of these according to his pleasure he may act or refuse to act. It is 
with this freedom in secular matters, and with this only, that so many of the 
moral philosophies of our day concern themselves. They are philosophies of 
man's original condition — of the metaphysical possibilities of his being. 
But they ignore a whole hemisphere of fact, when they profess to be exhaus- 
tive accounts of man's voluntary nature. Not man in an ideal abstract state, 
but man in his present moral state, is the man that we need to know ; and 
real concrete man can be studied only in his acts and his consciousness. 



D6 1 HK WILL IN THEOLOGY, OR. 

And when we once begin this study c-ithc-r in ourselves or in others, we find 
that we must set Bide by side with this consciousness of freedom in volition 
another consciousness of a malign will beneath, that hinders persistent 
choice of the right and hinds us to a deeper necessity of evil. 

And so, when we ask the question whether this causative power of the 
will as the faculty of volitions is equal to the task of permanently reversing 
the underlying tendency and current of the will considered as the self-deter- 
mination of the being to an ultimate end. experience must answer: "No!" 
Man has liberty. — liberty to enslave himself and to persevere in self-enslave- 
ment. His liberty is not ability to change his character at a single volition. 
Opposed to God and dominated by self-love as he is, he cannot of himself 
choose God and love holiness supremely. Self-love cannot throttle and 
slay self-love. The affections and desires remaining what they are, he can- 
not love God with all the heart. Let him make the effort, and he finds 
himself as powerless as a man standing upon the surface of the ground over 
one of those subterranean Kentucky rivers would be to turn back in its 
course the rushing torrent that flows beneath his feet. So man is at war 
with himself as well as with God. He has a formal freedom, but he is in 
real slavery. 

The error of the philosophy we are combating is therefore the error of 
dismembering our mental nature, of sundering the powers from each other, 
and of imagining that will, as the faculty of volitions, can act alone. But 
man is a complex whole. Whenever he acts, he acts as a whole. In thought 
we can distinguish between his different powers and speak of their functions 
and products ; but to suppose that the power of executive choice can some- 
how put itself outside of the man and secure a nov cttw from which it may 
move the man contrary to his character, is an error only a little less gro- 
tesque than that of personifying the divine attributes and of supposing that 
Wisdom speaks to Holiness and Holiness to Love. And so we have a 
method of thought with regard to man's faculty of volitions, which regards 
it as severed from reason and from affection, fancies that it can act sover- 
eignly in utter independence and disregard of motives, and believes that 
arbitrariness and uncertainty are of the very essence of freedom. And this 
is inseparable from and rests upon a narrow and defective conception of the 
will itself, which ignores that whole sphere of mental and moral movement 
which we call the preferences, the affections, the dispositions, the desires, 
into which we put more of power than we put into our imperative volitions, 
and which conscience holds us chiefly accountable for, because they consti- 
tute the real self, the real life, from which our outward acts spring and 
take their character. 

I am aware that the philosophy of the will which I am advocating enlarges 
the sphere of will and of responsibility greatly beyond the bounds assigned 
to it by superficial thought. But be sure that this philosophy is the phi- 
losophy of the future. He who can content himself with saying that will is 
the author of volitions only, and that he can charge himself only with what 
he has personally and consciously caused, is like the early navigators who 
described the continent of Africa from what they had learned by touching 
here and there along the coast. He who, in his explorations o2 his own 
nature, has fought his way. like Stanley, through endless jungles and 



AN EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. 97 

malarial swamps and mountainous barriers and savage enemies, will have a 
sadder but also a grander understanding of what is meant by Will. To 
sin-h a comprehensive philosophy of will we are coming by slow degrees. 
Schopenhauer and Hartmann in Germany, with all their pessimism and 
atheism, are bringing out, In their "Philosophies of the Unconscious," 
great facts of our nature which were never so clearly understood before. 
The fundamental thing in the universe, according to their systems, is not 
the Idea, as Hegel thought, but the Will. Not only is there unconscious 
cerebration and thought in our walking and in our sleep, but there Is also 
unconscious will and the putting forth of power. The thoughtful and 
conscientious student of his own nature will recognize here the gleams of 
truth. The will is nothing less than the soul in movement or tending to 
move. And responsibility is coextensive, not simply with our volitions, 
but with the whole range of our active being. 

In a recent French Evangelical Review (Revue Chretienne, Jan. 1878: 7) 
I find the following: "We have no initial power of determination. We can 
only yield to the divine impulse or to the attraction of sin. Our will is the 
effective cause of our conduct because these impulses solicit without con- 
straining us. But our liberty does not consist in producing an action of 
which It Is the only source. It consists In choosing between two preexistent 
impulses. It Is choice, not creation, which is our destiny." The doctrine 
here taught harmonizes perfectly with the view thus far presented, and 
enables us to make an important application of it. The will has sometimes 
been called a creative first cause. There is plausibility in such a definition, 
because the will is a causa cansans. But this is only the superficial aspect 
of the will. It is also a causa causata. The fundmental bias we find born 
in us. God is only causa causans, never causa causata. Let us then, 
with all reverence, reserve the title of Creative First Cause for Him who is 
the only absolute originator, and who can alone call substance, as well as 
activity, into being. 

From this point of view we can also perceive the right and the wrong 
meaning of the current phrase: "the power of a contrary choice." The 
power of a contrary choice is possible if with the volition you include the 
motive, if with the act you combine the desire. There is indeed an abstract 
natural possibility of choosing in either of two ways. But as another has 
said: "Actual choosing is dependent on motives, opportunities, moral bias, 
the antecedent state of the will itself. And this generic bias, this moral 
habit, determines the special volitions until some great crisis comes" — comes, 
we may add, as the result of aid and renewal from without. We say some- 
times to ourselves: "If I had this to do over again, I would do differently." 
Yes, if we could put ourselves back into the past with all the new disposi- 
tions and views which experience has given us. But when we ask ourselves 
whether, if we were put back there with just the views and feelings we had 
then, we should do differently, we are compelled to answer in the negative. 
But because we chose for reasons, and would not choose differently, we 
blame our choice. Our choice was none the less free and responsible because 
it was the natural sequence of our preceding dispositions. These preceding 
dispositions were ourselves. The will was in them. Being what we were 
we could not have chosen differently, but the power to choose as we did not 
7 



98 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, OR, 

wish to choose, was not necessary to make our action free. Indeed, if we 
could have acted In disregard of all motive and reason, the choice would 
have been devoid of all real freedom. To be free to do what we do not wish 
to do is no freedom at all. It is to be the blind victim of chance, or to play 
the part of the madman. The power of a contrary choice, in the sense of a 
power to decide against one's character and against all motives operating at 
the time upon the mind, is a power which not only has no existence, but of 
which we have not even the ability to conceive. The only actual or possible 
freedom is the freedom to manifest our character in mental action. 

It has not escaped your notice that we have thus far studiously avoided all 
reference to Scripture. It has been our aim to build up a doctrine of the 
will from the simple facts of consciousness. But we do not forget that we 
have a touchstone by which to determine its truth or error. The Bible does 
not indeed teach a formal scheme of mental science. Yet certain fundament- 
al views of will are everywhere implied in it. Let us bring our results to 
the test of Scripture. But first we may in the briefest manner state what 
these results are. They are, first, that the will as a faculty of volitions is 
the efficient cause of mental action ; secondly, that this faculty, though an 
efficient cause, is not an adequate and sufficient cause, but depends for its 
particular direction upon occasional causes in the shape of objects or reasons 
for its activity: thirdly, that these objects or reasons, which we call motives, 
are always, in the last analysis, internal and not external to the mind ; 
fourthly, that the internal dispositions and desires which give to motives all 
their force, are themselves optative states of the soul into which will, as well 
as sensibility, enters as a constituent element; fifthly, that will must there- 
fore be regarded as including not only the faculty of individual choices, but 
also the states of immanent preference in which the soul puts forth its power ; 
sixthly, that since the will as an efficient cause is determined as to the char- 
acter of its action by the will in the larger sense of the soul's fundamental 
preference, freedom in its executive acts may coexist with certainty and even 
necessity as to their particular nature; seventhly, that though man has lib- 
erty in manifesting his character, he is unable radically to change this char- 
acter if it be evil, or to reverse the self-determination of his being to an 
ultimate end, and that, because volition can never sunder itself from char- 
acter, nor the man escape from himself; eighthly, that the will's freedom is 
therefore so limited by the law of its own character and condition, which it 
did not individually originate, that man cannot justly be called a creative 
first cause, nor be credited with a power of contrary choice in matters of 
morals and religion. 

This view of the will, and the views to which it is directly opposed, we 
are now to test by the teachings of Scripture. And first, by the teachings of 
Scripture as to God's foreknowledge. By foreknowledge we mean the knowl- 
edge of something in the future that is certain to be. We must distinguish 
it clearly from ideal knowledge, or knowledge of what is merely possible. 
We can imagine God in eternity past to have had before him a multitude of 
plans for a universe. They are in his mind as merely ideal plans ; he knows 
them all in their minutest details. But so long as no one plan is fixed upon 
and adopted, he cannot be said to foreknow any of them, or any of the 
details of any of them. He cannot foreknow any one of these plans, except 



AN EARLIER VIEW OP THE WILL. 99 

when it ceases to be merely an ideal plan, and becomes a certainty of the 
future, and this certainty thai the events Included in it will take place can 
only be the result of his adopting the plan. The Scriptures declare God's 
absolute foreknowledge of the future. But that foreknowledge presupposes 
that the future is not simply ideally possible, or contingent, but is a thing 
of certainty, that is infallibly to be. 

"But," we are asked, "does not God foreknow what he will adopt, and 
docs not knowledge precede will in the order of nature?" I answer, knowl- 
edge of a thing as certain to be, cannot precede the fact of such certainty, 
for it would then be knowledge of what did not exist, and so would be a 
falsity and a delusion. And so knowledge of a plan certain to be carried 
out cannot precede the certainty of that plan, nor can it precede God's 
adoption of it, for this adoption is all that makes it certain. The knowledge 
which God has, before he adopts his plan, must be merely ideal knowledge 
of this plan among a variety of plans; it cannot be foreknowledge, for there 
can be no foreknowledge when there is as yet nothing certain in the future 
to be foreknown. The true order is therefore this: first, God's knowledge 
of various ideal plans; secondly, God's adoption of one of these plans and 
his consequent rendering it a certainty of the future ; thirdly, his foreknowl- 
edge of the events included in it, as certain to be. So we perceive that the 
certain future existence of events is the condition and prerequisite of God's 
foreknowledge. In other words, what Is not certain to be cannot be fore- 
known. 

Apply this now to the doctrine of the will. If there be no certainty about 
the future free actions of men, God himself cannot foreknow them. The 
view which we have taken of the will permits us to predicate certainty of 
man's free actions, because they take their direction from permanent influ- 
ences in the character. But the view opposed to this denies that there can 
be freedom where there is such certainty. It declares that the action that 
is certain cannot be free, and that the very essence of freedom is that the 
will is able to make an absolutely new beginning, and for the character of 
this new beginning no cause whatever can be assigned. Absolute uncer- 
tainty, perfect indeterminedness, on this view, is the only alternative to 
fatalism. Unless with precisely the same external and internal states and 
conditions the agent may just as easily make the opposite decision to that 
which he does actually make, the agent has no liberty at all. Now to this 
view of the will we simply oppose the Scripture declarations of God's abso- 
lute foreknowledge of the smallest decisions of his free creatures to the end 
of time. If he foreknows them, then they are certain to be. Uncertain 
things cannot be the objects of foreknowledge. Foreknowledge is of things 
to be, not of what may be or may not be. Even intuition cannot see what 
is not. God cannot foreknow what is not there to be foreknown. If there 
is nothing certain, then nothing can be foreseen or predicted, except that 
either this or that will take place, and a contingent foreknowledge is no 
foreknowledge at all. Omniscience does not make it possible for God to 
know things that are not objects of knowledge. Even he cannot tell what the 
results would be if two and two made five, or what would happen if chance 
ruled in the universe. But the theory we are opposing enthrones chance in 
the human will. And to declare that God can foreknow what this chance 



100 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, OH, 

will bring about is to declare that he can know nonsense and self-contradic- 
tion. Only upon the view that man's free actions arc under the law of char- 
acter, and therefore are out of the category of chance and uncertainty, can 
even the omniscient God know what they are to be. 

Many of the advocates of the caprice-theory of the will perceive their view 
to be inconsistent with belief in God's foreknowledge, and in various ways 
attempt to justify their surrender of this fundamental article of our faith. 
One of the most notable among them (see Hazard on Causation, 213) inti- 
mates that foreknowledge is not essential to the supreme governing Power 
of the universe, protests his repugnance to the notions of election and 
decrees, fancies that God may adapt moans to ends from moment to moment, 
and as he becomes aware of the necessities of each case, may draw out from 
his infinite resources the plan which he had devised to meet such an emer- 
gency should it ever occur. This writer conceives that the freedom of crea- 
tures may not have been possible except at the cost of a self-limitation of 
the divine knowledge, — God chose not to know beforehand what his crea- 
tures would do, lest he should impose fetters on their liberty. Does it occur 
to him, that upon the theory that the human will is necessarily an alterna- 
tive power God did not need to limit himself, since he could not surrender 
what he had not, namely, the power to foreknow as certain that which is 
essentially uncertain? To quote once more from Dr. Smith: "God him- 
self cannot see that to be one and no other, which is essentially and neces- 
sarily one or another." It is for this reason that the Socinians, with greater 
logical consistency, reject altogether the possibility of God's foreknowing 
free human actions. To Him, upon their view, the fall of Adam and the 
crucifixion of Christ would have been a surprise, had it not been that "com- 
ing events cast their shadows before," — though even then how divine 
sagacity itself could have converted chance into probability, is difficult to 
say. Prophecy is nothing but guess-work. Even God may be disap- 
pointed, for there is no limiting the absolute uncertainty of the human will. 
What is this but to discrown the omniscient One, in order that man may 
have a freedom as wild as that of Bedlam itself! 

Every such theory when tested by Scripture is found to contradict the 
express teachings of revelation. God foreknows all, because it is certain 
what human action will be. And human action is certain, because all men 
have character. Human character is not beyond the control of circumstances 
and influences which God has arranged and appointed. If man, influenced 
by man, may still be free, then man influenced by divinely appointed cir- 
cumstances may still be free. Because we know something of the charac- 
ters of our fellow-men and of the influence of their surroundings upon 
them, we are able to a certain extent to predict their actions, and statistical 
averages may be compiled, which shall make known to us beforehand their 
action in masses. All this witnesses that freedom is not inconsistent with 
laws and uniformities of action. It is only by observing these laws that we 
control our own mental powers or induce others to serve us. If we were 
wise enough, we could predict all human action. Much more is every 
human being "naked and open to the eyes of Him with whom we have to 
do." How he executes his all-comprehending plan we know not. But we 
do know that he cannot resign his sovereignty. No creature can be inde- 



AN EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. 101 

pendent of him. Man's freedom cannot wrest the sceptre from his hand 
nor bandage the eyes of his omniscience. But God's sovereignty and his 
foreknowledge must both he surrendered, if the certainty of human voli- 
tions be incompatible with freedom. 

In the second place, let us test the doctrine we have propounded by the 
teachings of Scripture as to man's responsibility for his native depravity. 
That man is depraved by uature and is condemnable for this depravity, the 
Scripture distinctly asserts when it declares that we are "by nature children 
of wrath." Nature here can mean only that which is inborn and original in 
contrast with that which is subsequently acquired* There is a congenital 
bias of the will toward evil, an unholy bent of the affections away from God, 
and a supreme preference of self, at the very basis of our moral being, 
apart from and prior to our consciousness. Upon this original depravity of 
the soul the wrath of the holy One rests. But God's wrath rests only upon 
that which deserves it.- This nature therefore is justly condemnable and we 
are responsible for it. We will not multiply passages to prove that this is 
the teaching of Scripture, although we might show that this is God's own 
explanation of the universal fact of death, even in the case of those who 
have not come to moral consciousness, and his explanation likewise of the 
uniformity of sinful volitions in all men and all ages. Actual sins arc the 
fruit, and actual death is the penalty, of a depravity with which we are born 
and for which we are notwithstanding held responsible. Nor is this the 
place to justify the Scripture teaching, although we could adduce weighty 
confirmations of it from the facts of history and from the testimony of most 
acute and holy men as to that human nature which in themselves and others 
they have subjected to so penetrating and pure a scrutiny. We might bring 
forward a multitude of witnesses from the ranks of law and literature and 
philosophy, and all of them outside the pale of professed Christianity, who 
would with one voice declare that they felt within them a fatal necessity of 
evil, a taint of nature below conscious choice, a moral gravitation to the 
wrong, which they did not personally originate, and yet for which, strangely 
enough, they are not able to shake off the sense of blameworthiness. Aris- 
totle anticipates Paul's account of the evil law in the members, though he 
is not able, as Paul is, to answer the question: "Who shall deliver me from 
the body of this death?" And Seneca in certain passages seems almost to 
echo David's words: "Behold I was shapen in iniquity and in sin did my 
mother conceive me." 

Our present purpose is, however, simply to make plain the fact that this 
Scriptural teaching is consistent with the view of will which we have pre- 
sented, but is inconsistent with any other. If our view be true, then man 
may be responsible for his nature, — for his nature is will. His whole 
being, in moral movement or tending to moral movement, is within the 
sphere of will, and for this current of tendency he is accountable, because 
it is his inmost self. But the opposing theory denies that there can be such 
a thing as unconscious will, and, limiting will to the mere faculty of voli- 
tions, maintains that no man can be responsible for anything that he has 
not personally and consciously originated. If it take the Pelagian form, it 
uses the phrase: "Non pleni nasvimur/' and calls the soul at birth a "tab- 
ula rasa," void of all evil whatsoever. Or if it take the Arminian form, ii 



102 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, OR, 

speaks of a depravity for which we are not responsible except as we by con- 
scious act appropriate it. The Roman Catholic can exclude concupiscence 
from the list of sins, because forsooth it is independent of our volitions. 
Thus nothing but presumptuous choices of evil, with the full consciousness 
of the law to be violated and a wilful determination to disobey God, is 
counted by many to be a sin at all. On this view, indeed, the only sin 
should be the sin against the Holy Gnost. 

What we wish to point out most plainly- is that the view of the will which 
we are opposing conflicts with Scripture by letting off the human conscience 
from the- main part of the burden which God lays upon it in his revelation. 
Who can draw the line between the conscious and the unconscious? Who 
can tell what we have originated and what we have not? Are anger and 
lust always conscious? Yet the angry feeling is murder, and the impure 
look is adultery- Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, and the heart 
from which they come is evil. Sin is not simply an act — it is a principle 
of permanence and power, that reigns in the nature, that exists long before 
it revives or comes to light in the consciousness. These are the represen- 
tations of Scripture, and we charge the view of will which regards it as the 
faculty of volitions alone with obscuring from men's minds these facts of 
God's word. If sin is only volition, and I can be responsible for nothing 
else, then sin has but limited range within me and but weak hold upon me. 
It cannot be so serious a thing as Scripture describes. And just in propor- 
tion as the sense of sin is blunted, does man cease to feel his need of par- 
don and renewal. 

If man is responsible only for what he wills, and will is only his power of 
individual choices, it follows that God's law requires only what this will can 
render in the way of obedience. Law ceases to be the perfect transcript of 
God's holy nature, the ideal and unchangeable standard for all moral beings. 
It reduces its majesty to the limits of outward enactment and known enact- 
ment. Nothing that is beyond the apprehension of the blinded intellect or 
beyond the range of the enfeebled moral powers can be law for any creature 
of God. Thus law becomes a sliding scale of moral requirement, that low- 
ers its demands as the sinner becomes more blind and debased and guilty, 
and gives up its claims altogether when he becomes totally depraved and 
beyond recovery. But is it true that the law has nothing against the man 
who has so sunk himself in sin that he has lost all power to obey? You 
know such persons ; does God's justice absolve thorn and let them go free 
of punishment? The doctrine that man is responsible only for his acts of 
volition, and that power to do right is always essential to accountability for 
doing wrong, comes dangerously near to these conclusions. Those who hold 
this view of will are compelled to assume a "gracious ability" specially com- 
municated by God, in order to render men guilty at all, and then to declare 
that for a great number of irresponsibles, tender in age or weak in mind or 
limited in opportunities, salvation must be a matter of justice, since they 
have no ability to obey. So there shall be some saved without Christ. Why 
should the lost suffer penalty when their power to turn to God is gone for- 
ever? A system of the will that leads logically >to the conclusion that men 
are guilty only by virtue of "gracious ability," and approved when their sin 
has taken away all power of good within them, carries with it its own refu- 



AN EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. 103 

tation. It may not inaptly be described as a scheme in which men are 
damned by grace and saved by sin. 

It is of course objected to our own view that to hold man responsible for 
an inborn state of the will which he did not originate Is to violate all princi- 
ples of justice and to expose Christianity to ridicule and contempt. We 
reply that if this is the teaching of Scripture, we may trust that God will 
vindicate his own truth. But it is self -vindicated also. A profounder phil- 
osophy of human nature is found to correspond precisely with the ideas 
which unlettered Christians had drawn from the Bible long before. We 
must not forget, moreover, that the modern scientific notion of the solidarity 
of the race is anticipated in Scripture, and furnishes the answer to the ques- 
tion how we can be responsible for what we have not personally and con- 
sciously originated. Men are not separate atoms, like grains of sand, or 
bricks set in a row. They are of one blood and origin, and are bound 
together in an organic whole. Look down upon the tree from above and 
you see only the multitudinous leaves in their isolation from each other. 
But look up from below, and you perceive that each leaf springs from a 
twig, and each twig from a branch, and each branch from a common trunk, 
and the great oak is only the product of a single acorn that the foot of an ox 
trod into the soil a hundred years ago. So the superficial observer regards 
the human race only as a company of individuals, and he denies all organic 
connection between them. But they are sprung from a common stock, and 
a common life is in them. The only explanation of universal depravity is 
the fall of the whole race when it existed seminally in its first progenitor. 
We have drawn our life from him, corrupted as it was by his sin. The will 
of the race apostatized from God when it was concentrated in one man, and 
of that self-depraved will we partake. So there is an individual responsibil- 
ity and a race responsibility also, and any theory of will which regards it as 
the mere faculty of individual volitions must ignore a whole half of the facts 
and put it forever beyond our power to explain the great problem of our 
accountability for the depravity which we have in common with every 
member of the race. 

We now proceed to consider a third class of Scripture passages which 
perhaps better than any other tests the truth or falsity of a doctrine 
of the will. We mean the teachings of the Bible with regard to God's 
initiative In human salvation. On the one hand, it is declared that man 
cannot of himself provide a salvation, nor lay hold of it after it is pro- 
vided. On the other hand, God gives man all the power by which salvation 
is ever accepted, and from the first step to the last he claims all the glory. 
Of the first sort are passages like these: "Can the Ethiopian change his 
skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good that are accus- 
tomed to do evil." "The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not 
subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." "No man can come unto 
me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him." And of the latter 
sort are the following: "Who maketh thee to differ? What hast thou, that 
thou hast not received?" It is God that makes us "willing in the day of 
his power," that "gives repentance," that "deals to every man the measure 
of faith," that "creates us in Christ unto good works." We have not chosen 
him but he has chosen us. It is he who gives the new heart and the new 



104 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, OR, 

6pirit. It Is "of him" that we "are in Christ Jesus." We are "saved, not 
according to our works, but according to his purpose and grace." This sal- 
vation is "the gift of God — not of ourselves, lest any man should boast." 
It is only "by the grace of God" that we are what we are. No man has 
freedom but "he whom the Son makes free." Nicodemus asks what he 
shall do, and Jesus replies that "except a man be born from above, he can- 
not enter the kingdom of heaven." Those who believe on Christ's name are 
"born, not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." " So 
then," says Paul, "it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, 
but of God that showeth mercy." 

Thus, in endless variety of phrase, the Bible asserts that man's appropria- 
tion of salvation is solely of the Lord. And so we pray to God to save men, 
believing that their hearts are in his hand, and that he can turn them as 
easily as the tiny rivulets that irrigate the eastern fields are turned by the 
slightest motion of the hand or foot of the husbandman. We know that no 
heart is too hard for God to break, no will too obstinate for God to subdue, 
for nothing is impossible with God ; he who created at the first can recreate 
at his will. We look back to our own experience and see that instead of 
helping God's work in us, we only resisted him ; as the untutored Indian 
convert said: "I fought against him all I could, and God did the rest." 
We may have seemed to ourselves at the first to be wholly uninfluenced by 
God when we chose to enter upon his service; but subsequent experience has 
taught us that nothing but his power working secretly in our wills could 
have conquered our perversity and brought us to Christ. We say now of 
every stage of the process: "Not unto us, not unto us, but unto thy name 
give glory;" and the hymn of Isaac Watts expresses only the truth of our 
experience : — 

*' Why was I made to hear thy voice 

And enter while there's room, 
While thousands make a wretched choice, 

And rather starve than come? 

" 'Twas the same love that spread the feast 
That gently forced me in ; 
Else I had still refused to taste, 
And perished in my sin! " 

And in this mighty grace that not only offered us salvation if we would 
accept it, but which made us will to accept when otherwise we should have 
refused, in this mighty grace we place our only hope of personal salvation, 
our only encouragement to the work of the ministry, and our only assurance 
of the salvation of the world. 

All this accords perfectly with the view we have supported, that the 
human will, with all its formal freedom, is yet in real slavery to evil, and 
possessed of no outlying and uncorrupted power by which it may separate 
itself from itself, in order that it may work down upon itself and change its 
character. If the will is the whole man with all his powers of movement 
and impulse, and this will is in one perpetual current and tendency toward 
self-gratification and away from God, then it is vain to speak of man's being 
saved by natural process of growth or development of some element of good 
within, or by any choice or cooperation on his part with the grace which 
comes to him from without. But all this seems foolishness to those who 



AN EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. 105 

maintain the theory of will we hare been opposing. To them there must 
be always in the will the power of a contrary choice, the power of deciding 
against character. The Pelagian holds that there is no seated disease of the 
will, and that man may at any moment reverse the current of his wrong 
volitions and may become holy without help of any sort from without ; while 
the Arminian, granting that man must have help, still claims that man has 
power to accept that help or to reject it, and that tins acceptance, if it takes 
place at all, takes place in virtue of a freedom which still remains to him to 
decide as he will in spite of his character. Here are two men. Their char- 
acters are the same. Their circumstances are the same. The grace offered 
them is the same. The one accepts that grace ; the other refuses it. The 
one is saved ; the other lost. What makes them to differ in their decision 
and their destiny? Their own free choice, the Arminian replies. And so 
not to God, but to man, is due the merit and the glory of salvation. Man 
elects and regenerates himself. Before man's lordly will God himself stands 
powerless. If we would save men, we must pray to men, not to God. 
To use a rude metaphor, salvation is a two-horse vehicle, and man draws 
as much as God. In truth, God will never draw unless man begins. And 
as man can begin, so he can continue. Entire sanctification is just as 
completely within his power as is his first turning from sin. 

Now this is a complete reversal of the true relation between God and man 
In the work of salvation. Man indeed is not passive — he is active; but 
then he acts because God prompts and sustains his action. No synergistic 
scheme which regards the human will as taking the initiative, and by its own 
power laying hold of and appropriating salvation, can find anything but 
refutation and condemnation in the Scriptures. And yet these false and 
anti-Biblical conclusions are the logical and necessary result of a theory 
which holds that will is a power of individual choices only, and that this 
power can be exercised sovereignly in independence of the man's previous 
character and condition. These conclusions are as irrational as they are 
unscriptural. The view that regeneration is the act of man, cooperating with 
divine influences applied through the truth, provides no way for the begin- 
ning of holiness. For so long as man's selfish and perverse affections are 
unchanged, no choosing God is possible but such as proceeds from supreme 
desire for one's own interest and happiness. But the man thus supremely 
bent on self-gratification cannot see in God or his service anything productive 
of happiness ; or, if he could see in them anything of advantage, his choice 
of God and his service from such a motive would not be a beginning of holi- 
ness. Man cannot change himself. The depravity of his will, since it con- 
sists in a fixed state of the affections which determines the character of all 
the volitions, amounts to a moral inability. Without a renewal of the affec- 
tions from which all moral action springs, man will not choose holiness nor 
accept salvation. Surely we must reject a theory of the will which equally 
denies the plainest facts of experience and of Scripture, and which would 
rob God of his crowning glory, by making man his own savior. 

Still another and a last set of passages in the Scriptures is that which 
asserts the permanence of holy character in God and in the redeemed. 
There is a certainty of final perseverance and salvation in the case of every 
true believer. It is the Father's good pleasure to give such the kingdom, 



106 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, OR, 

and none shall be able to separate them from the love of Christ, or pluck 
them out of Christ's hand. So too, the Bible declares that God cannot lie. 
and cannot change. We rest upon these declarations as our great comfort 
and hope for the future. We trust in an everlasting love, and a mighty 
power, which will keep us through faith unto salvation, and will present us 
at last faultless, in the presence of the Father's glory, with exceeding joy. 
With all this agrees the theory of will which we have advocated. Volitions 
will follow character. No chance rules in the realm of will. Integrity will 
not lie. Holiness will not sin. Because God is God, and cannot change, 
he will fulfill his promises, and so confirm In goodness the wills of his saints, 
that on earth, those who have been renewed by his Spirit shall not fall away 
from their allegiance, and in heaven the just made perfect shall go no more 
out forever. 

Character and its permanence, certainty of good conduct consistent with 
freedom, possibility of a moral necessity of righteousness — these are prin- 
ciples upon which we base all our confidence in God or man. But chiefly 
our confidence in God. For, weak and unstable as we are by reason of the 
two conflicting powers that move and work within us, we see no hope for 
permanence or rest in anything but God. But the philosophy we have been 
considering would shatter all our confidence, by persuading us that Inde- 
terminateness is the very essence of freedom, and that no confirmed good- 
ness is possible. Since the will may always act contrary to motives and to 
inclinations, to influences and to character, not even God himself can make 
it certain that we shall not fall. Satan, it is said, had every inducement to 
maintain his allegiance to God, yet he apostatized. And beyond this lib- 
erty of indeterminateness, which is evermore upon the edge of the precipice, 
and is never certain that the next moment may not witness a causeless 
plunge into the abyss, beyond such liberty as this, the theory declares, there 
is no other conceivable or possible to God or man. The wild liberty of a 
Greek democracy is of a higher sort than a liberty regulated by law. May 
God save me from such liberty as this; for, if Satan fell and Adam fell, 
there are ten thousand chances to one that, uukept by God and unconfirmed 
in goodness, I too, sometime in the infinite range of existence before me, 
shall fall away from God and perish forever. 

Indeed I know no reason for confidence, upon this view, that God him- 
self will continue holy. Holiness is not a matter of nature, but of arbitrary 
will. There would be no merit or freedom in it, we are told, if God had 
not the power to be unholy. Dr. Dwight * considers that if sin produced 
as much good as virtue, it would be as commendable as virtue is, in either 
God or man. There is no certainty that God will abide in righteousness; 
for he has free-will, and the essence of free-will is uncertainty. And so we 
have from Dr. Whedon such sorry utterances as these that follow: "Whether 
God could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can 
say." Nor can we say "whether the motives may not at some time prove 
strongest for divine apostasy to evil." Ah, how much these philosophers 
are willing to sacrifice for a theory ! Would that they could perceive the 
deeper philosophy that lies under those grand and simple formulas of 



* Works, 3 : 159. 



AX EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. 107 

Augustine. Man was created, he would say, with a posse non peccare. 
But this was accompanied by a posse peccare also, and so it was only child- 
like innocence, but not confirmed virtue. Through trial and temptation, 
his true calling was to transform this freedom to sin or not to sin, into per- 
fected holiness — the non posse peccare which belongs to God and to the 
elect angels. Then good would Lave become the law of his being. Holi- 
ness would have been so inwrought into his character, that freedom of will, 
for him, would have been identical with the necessity of good. But he fell ; 
and instead of the blessed non posse peccare, there resulted the dreadful 
necessity of evil, the non posse non peccare, which is identical with moral 
slavery and ruin. The scheme of Augustine is profounder and truer and 
more Scriptural than that of Arminius. The doctrine that man may fall 
from grace, and God may fall from holiness, however ably it has been sup- 
ported, and however piously its advocates have lived, does yet tend to the 
making of weak and unstable Christians, in whom weakness and instability 
are combined with self-sufficiency and small sense of their dependence upon 
God. But the true idea of freedom as ability to conform to the divine 
standard, and the certainty that the believer will attain to it and exemplify 
it in the perfect state which we are soon to enter, this gives nerve and cheer, 
and tends to the making of reverent and trustful and humble and persever- 
ing disciples. But this is not the chief merit of the view that volition is 
inseparable from character. Its chief merit is that it stands the test of 
Scripture and proves itself to be the philosophy of the word of God. . 

We have thus expounded our view of will, and have tried it by the standard 
of revelation. It only remains to mention the most striking objections that 
have been urged against it, and to show, if possible, that they are insufficient 
to invalidate the considerations urged in its support. For lack of space, our 
treatment of them must be very summary, but we shall endeavor to make it 
candid and sufficient. First, then, it is urged that the mind must have the 
power of acting without motives, because men do actually choose between 
things precisely equal and similar, and because God actually adopts one plan 
out of many of equal value, and elects one man while he passes by another 
of no less worth than he. Now I think it will be granted by all, that these 
cases, if they exist, are rare and exceptional ones, and do not reveal the ordi- 
nary law of the will's working. They do not therefore overturn our previous 
reasoning, the aim of which has been to discover the general principles of a 
theory of the will. Furthermore, we all know that in the case of human 
action, the instances where motives are apparently evenly balanced are 
always in matters of utter insignificance ; at any rate, we never act in the 
weightier affairs of life, without seeing at least some reason for deciding in 
one way rather than another. But passing these considerations as merely 
preliminary, we make the general and broad denial that motives are ever, in 
human affairs, evenly balanced. There is always some preference which the 
man follows even in touching with his finger one of two squares on the 
checker-board, or else he chooses to put down his finger without knowing 
where it will rest. In either case it is absurd to suppose he puts his finger 
where he does not wish to, and if he does put it where he wants to put it, 
then he follows some motive, even though it be nothing more than this, that 
a certain square first strikes his eye or is nearest to his baud. The motive 



108 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, OR, 

is there, though it may be in the man himself, not in the squares, when 
these do not differ from each other. And so our judgment is that the ass 
that starved between the two bundles of hay, because the attractions of each 
were so exactly balanced as to keep him in a state of stable equilibrium 
between them, was indeed an ass. Thus far we have spoken of man. But 
the case is not essentially different when we apply the principle to God. 
We cannot believe that he chose a less worthy plan of the universe in place 
of a more worthy, for this would deny his benevolence as well as his wisdom. 
We therefore say that of many plans he chose the present — not without 
reason, but for reasons inscrutable to us. So God chooses one man to eternal 
life, not because of anything in him, but for reasons which exist only in God 
and which are unrevealed to us. The reasons why I choose one of two pre- 
cisely similar gold pieces, are external to the gold pieces themselves. The 
reasons are in me, in my physical condition or my feelings at the time. But 
there are reasons, and the choice is never an act independent of motives. 
So God may choose between plans and between men, for reasons internal to 
his own nature. To assert that God chooses without reasons is to deny his 
wisdom. To assert that his reasons must be found in things external to 
himself, or that these reasons must be comprehensible to us, is to ignore, on 
the one hand, his likeness to men, and on the other hand, his infinite eleva- 
tion above them. To deny that God may have reasons within himself even 
in choosing between things which, considered as merely external to himself, 
are equals, is to deny the possibility either of external creation or of move- 
ment of any kind within God's nature. For God is infinite and self-sufficient. 
He does not create to satisfy any want in himself, for he has no want to be 
satisfied. He does not create to increase his glory, but to reveal his glory. 
But if creation and non-creation are equally consistent with his blessedness, 
then he must create for reasons in himself alone. Any other principle would 
deny the existence and possibility of any thought or movement whatever in 
God, and render him as "idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean,'' a 
veritable Buddha, devoid of all consciousness and personality. We should 
not be willing to go to these lengths even to save a good theory of the will ; 
we certainly are not willing to go to these lengths for the sake of saving a 
bad one. 

A second and more serious objection to our doctrine is, that upon this 
view, the first man, since he had a holy disposition, could never have sinned. 
We must either maintain, it is said, that Adam was created with an already 
corrupted will, which would throw the blame of his sin upon his Creator, or 
that he never fell at all. which would contradict our general scheme quite as 
much as it contradicts Scripture. We acknowledge that here, as well as in 
t lie divine permission of moral evil, there is a difficulty which we cannot 
fully solve. But we claim that the ditfic-ulty does not lie where the opponents 
of our view imagine, and that what difficulty does exist is by no means so 
vital and perilous as that which attends the scheme which they themselves 
maintain. We would begin our reply by freely acknowledging that there is 
a sense in which we must allow that our first father had the power of con- 
trary choice. He was created pure, and might have maintained his integrity. 
He actually fell, and so possessed the power of choosing evil. Here were 
power of good and power of evil in one and the same being. In this sense, 



AN EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. 100 

Adam bad the power of contrary choice — had it In a sense In which none of 
his descendants naturally have it; if they have it at all, it is as the result of 
divine grace, which puts side by side with the natural tendencies to sin, 
other and, on the whole, dominant tendencies to holiness. But this power 
of contrary choice which Adam possessed was not the nondescript and 
absurd faculty which our Arminian friends understand by the name. It was 
not an ability to decide without motives or contrary to all motives. It was 
not a self-contradictory ability to choose what he did not wish to choose, or 
to choose what on the whole he did not want. Adam's choice of evil, then, 
does not prove that he chose without motive or contrary to motive, and so 
his choice does not in the least help the philosophy of our opponents. The 
difficulty in the case is not in imagining how Adam could choose without or 
against motive, but in understanding how sinful motive could have found 
lodgment in a heart already prepossessed with a concreated disposition to 
holiness. Adam chose evil been use lie wanted to. How could he want to 
choose it? — that is the real question. 

rartial and insufficient explanations of this great fact have been attempted. 
The fact of Satanic temptation has been urged as accounting for the fall. 
The adversary, it is said, deceived our first parents, and this deception fur 
nished the force needed to counterbalance their natural tendencies to good. 
But this is rather a hiding of the difficulty than an escape from it. For their 
yielding to such deception presupposes distrust of God and alienation from 
him. And then, even if this were a sufficient answer as respects Adam, it 
would only remove the problem one step further back. For Satan's fall, or 
at least, the fall of the first created spirit that apostatized, cannot be ex- 
plained by temptation from without. To say that God creates any finite 
being with original disposition to evil, is the greatest of blasphemies, for 
it denies his holiness and makes him the virtual author of sin. Sin is the 
wilful revolt of the free creature from God. At his own door, and not at 
the door of God or of any fellow-creature, the blame of it must be laid. 

A more plausible explanation is that which regards the fall as due to the 
withholding of supernatural grace, and so to be a demonstration that even 
free and pure intelligences must have their life in God, and cannot maintain 
their integrity without him. The grace given to Adam, it is said, was assist- 
ing grace, which he could use or not, as he willed. The grace given to us 
is grace that makes us will, and will aright. That only assisting grace, and 
not overcoming grace, was given to Adam, was not a penalty, but a tribute 
to his strength and perfection, which was naturally equal to the task before 
it. Now, grace is omnipotent, because nature is wholly without power. 
Then, grace was weak, because nature was strong. We recognize a measure 
of truth in this view. Irresistible grace certainly cannot be claimed as a 
matter of right by free creatures, perfectly endowed and naturally able to 
keep God's law. It makes the fall somewhat more intelligible, by its sug- 
gestion that the first sin was the inward withdrawing of the affections from 
God and consequent self -isolation of the spirit from the ever-ready influx of 
divine love and power. But the "why?" still remains unanswered, and the 
"how?" is still unexplained. What motive to withdraw from God? And 
if the motive be assigned, whence could the motive come? The mere power 
of choice does not explain the fact of an unholy choice. The fact of natural 



103 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, OR, 

is there, though it may be in the man himself, not in the squares, when 
these do not differ from each other. And so our judgment is that the ass 
that starved between the two bundles of hay, because the attractions of each 
were so exactly balanced as to keep him in a state of stable equilibrium 
between them, was indeed an ass. Thus far we have spoken of man. But 
the case is not essentially different when we apply the principle to God. 
We cannot believe that he chose a less worthy plan of the universe in place 
of a more worthy, for this would deny his benevolence as well as his wisdom. 
We therefore say that of many plans he chose the present — not without 
reason, but for reasons inscrutable to us. So God chooses one man to eternal 
life, not because of anything in him, but for reasons which exist only in God 
and which are unrevealed to us. The reasons why I choose one of two pre- 
cisely similar gold pieces, are external to the gold pieces themselves. The 
reasons are in me, in my physical condition or my feelings at the time. But 
there are reasons, and the choice is never an act independent of motives. 
So God may choose between plans and between men, for reasons internal to 
his own nature. To assert that God chooses without reasons is to deny his 
wisdom. To assert that his reasons must be found in things external to 
himself, or that these reasons must be comprehensible to us, is to ignore, on 
the one hand, his likeness to men, and on the other hand, his infinite eleva- 
tion above them. To deny that God may have reasons within himself even 
in choosing between things which, considered as merely external to himself, 
are equals, is to deny the possibility either of external creation or of move- 
ment of any kind within God's nature. For God is infinite and self-sufficient. 
He does not create to satisfy any want in himself, for he has no want to be 
satisfied. He does not create to increase his glory, but to reveal his glory. 
But if creation and non-creation are equally consistent with his blessedness, 
then he must create for reasons in himself alone. Any other principle would 
deny the existence and possibility of any thought or movement whatever in 
God, and render him as "idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean," a 
veritable Buddha, devoid of all consciousness and personality. We should 
not be willing to go to these lengths even to save a good theory of the will ; 
we certainly are not willing to go to these lengths for the sake of saving a 
bad one. 

A second and more serious objection to our doctrine is, that upon this 
view, the first man, since he had a holy disposition, could never have sinned. 
We must either maintain, it is said, that Adam was created with an already 
corrupted will, which would throw the blame of his sin upon his Creator, or 
that he never fell at all. which would contradict our general scheme quite as 
much as it contradicts Scripture. We acknowledge that here, as well as in 
the divine permission of moral evil, there is a difficulty which we cannot 
ftllly solve. But we claim that the difficulty does not lie where the opponents 
of our view imagine, and that what difficulty does exist is by no means so 
vital and perilous as that which attends 1 lie scheme which they themselves 
maintain. We would begin our reply by freely acknowledging that there is 
a sense in which we must allow that our first father had the power of con- 
trary choice. He was created pure, and might have maintained his integrity. 
lie actually fell, and so possessed the power of choosing evil. Here were 
power of good and power of evil in one and the same being. In this sense. 



AN EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. 109 

Adam had the power of contrary choice — had it in a sense in which none of 
his descendants naturally have it; if they have it at all, it is as the result of 
divine grace, which puts side by side with the natural tendencies to sin. 
other and, on the whole, dominant tendencies to holiness. But this power 
of contrary choice which Adam possessed was not the nondescript and 
absurd faculty which our Arminian friends understand by the name. It was 
not an ability to decide without motives or contrary to all motives. It was 
not a self-contradictory ability to choose what he did not wish to choose, or 
to choose what on the whole he did not want. Adam's choice of evil, then, 
does not prove that he chose without motive or contrary to motive, and so 
his choice does not in the least help the philosophy of our opponents. The 
difficulty in the case is not in imagining how Adam could choose without or 
against motive, but in understanding how sinful motive could have found 
lodgment in a heart already prepossessed with a eoncreated disposition to 
holiness. Adam chose evil because he wanted to. How could he want to 
choose it? — that is the real question. 

Partial and insufficient explanations of this srreat fact have been attempted. 
The fact of Satanic temptation has been urged as accounting for the fall. 
The adversary, it is said, deceived our first parents, and this deception fur- 
nished the force needed to counterbalance their natural tendencies to good. 
But this is rather a hiding of the difficulty than an escape from it. For their 
yielding to such deception presupposes distrust of God and alienation from 
him. And then, even if this were a sufficient answer as respects Adam, it 
would only remove the problem one step further back. For Satan's fall, or 
at least, the fall of the first created spirit that apostatized, cannot be ex- 
plained by temptation from without. To say that God creates any finite 
being with original disposition to evil, is the greatest of blasphemies, for 
it denies his holiness and makes him the virtual author of sin. Sin is the 
wilful revolt of the free creature from God. At his own door, and not at 
the door of God or of any fellow-creature, the blame of it must be laid. 

A more plausible explanation is that which regards the fall as due to the 
withholding of supernatural grace, and so to be a demonstration that even 
free and pure intelligences must have their life in God, and cannot maintain 
their integrity without him. The grace given to Adam, it is said, was assist- 
ing grace, which he could use or not, as he willed. The grace given to us 
is grace that makes us will, and will aright. That only assisting grace, and 
not overcoming grace, was given to Adam, was not a penalty, but a tribute 
to his strength and perfection, which was naturally equal to the task before 
It. Now, grace is omnipotent, because nature is wholly without power. 
Then, grace was weak, because nature was strong. We recognize a measure 
of truth in this view. Irresistible grace certainly cannot be claimed as a 
matter of right by free creatures, perfectly endowed and naturally able to 
keep God's law. It makes the fall somewhat more intelligible, by its sug- 
gestion that the first sin was the inward withdrawing of the affections from 
God and consequent self-isolation of the spirit from the ever-ready influx of 
divine love and power. But the "why?" still remains unanswered, and the 
"how?" is still unexplained. What motive to withdraw from God? And 
if the motive be assigned, whence could the motive come? The mere power 
of choice does not explain the fact of an unholy choice. The fact of natural 



112 THE WILL IN THEOLOGY, OR, 

aroused to see the misery that lies before him and his family, may refurm 
and become sober. Nay, we go further, and grant that there may be 
advances to forms of character of high intellectuality and of vast service to 
human welfare aud progress, while yet the heart is unchanged, and the man 
is in spirit far from God. The gentleness of the worldly man may even 
simulate the grace of Christian love, and the steadfastness of worldly integ- 
rity may be mistaken for Christian principle, yet no power be at work but 
the self-contained and self-regarding principle that lies at the basis of the 
natural character. 

Now all this possibility of growth in good we grant, so long as it is allowed 
that the human will cannot go further, and change the fundamental affec- 
tion which constitutes its inmost character. We may grow in moral evil, by 
natural process, but not into true moral good. For moral good and natural 
good are two very different things. Moral good, in the sense in which we 
use the term, is only the fruit of the truest motive, love to God. And even 
the first beginnings of moral good are impossible without the inworkiug of 
the Holy Spirit. Man can choose between different ways of manifesting his 
natural disposition and determination ; lie may repress certain tendencies to 
evil, and may secure a growth in useful habit. But all the while, the inner 
motive of his striving will fail to be the highest motive, and his character 
will fail to meet the divine approval. This motive and this character, no 
power but God's can change. But can he not bend his mind to truth, and 
bring before him the force of outward facts that tend to enlighten and soften 
aud subdue? Abstractly, yes. Practically, no. He has the natural power 
of attention, but alas, he will not attend. What is needed is, not new light 
on the picture, but the removal of the cataract which prevents him from 
seeing the picture. What is needed is, not volitions, prompted by the old 
selfish desire for his own interest and welfare, but a new affection towards 
God, which will make him, in the deepest fountain of his being, conformed 
to the divine holiness and empowered to the doiug of God's will. 

And this need of a new principle and motive, such as only God can give, 
is what the theory of will we are opposing, constantly tends to ignore. 
Would that its advocates could learn the humility and dependence of spirit 
which would enable them to understand this truth aright ! You remember 
that when John and James, two brothers dear to our Lord, but not yet taught 
by the Spirit as they were a little after, came to Christ and besought the high 
places in his kingdom, Jesus put to them the searching question: "Can ye 
drink of the cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism that I am 
baptized with?" Little did they know of the mighty and awful import of 
those words — the cup of suffering in Gethsemane and on Calvary, and the 
baptism of death and the grave that was to follow. But the question daunted 
them not. In their profound ignorance of Christ and of themselves, they 
said with a light and cheerful sense of independence and of power: "We 
are able!" How wonderful it is that Christ's rebuke was so gentle, how 
wonderful that he accepted even this self -ignorant and self -trustful deter- 
mination to follow him, and then, taking the will for the deed, by his mighty 
Pentecostal Spirit made the deed equal to the will, so that James drank 
gladly the bitter cup of martyrdom, and John's long century life-time was 
baptized into the spirit of the Savior's death ! But has man nothing to do 



AN EARLIER VIEW OF THE WILL. 113 

then in his own salvation? Yes, I say; but it is with the ability that God 
giveth. God works, not before our working, but in and through our work- 
ing. And he has shown men what is the work of God, namely, that they 
believe on Christ, his only begotten Son. This is man's duty, this is man's 
privilege, the moment the gospel message conies to him. The change of 
character is wrought by God's power alone, in and through man's trust and 
submission to the Savior. It is the old story of the withered hand. Was 
there ability there? Was the man wholly unresponsible for obedience until 
his hand was healed? Should he delay to stretch it forth, until Christ had 
wrought his cure? Ah, he might have waited forever without being healed, 
if he had held a certain theory of the will that we know of. Nay, there was 
duty there, before there was power ; yet the healing did not follow upon 
obedience, but communicated the very power to obey. So there are lost 
men, whose moral nerves arc shrivelled and powerless, and their very capa- 
city of obedience gone. Without a renewal of their wills, they will not, they 
cannot, accept salvation. Yet we are hidden to go and preach to them that 
they turn at once from their iniquities and believe in Christ. Thank God, 
though they have not the power to change their characters, there is a divine 
Spirit who can do this work, and who, with our word of command and invi- 
tation and promise, will energize the impotent will, and will cause it to 
rouse itself from its slumber of death, and to put forth new and God-givLn 
powers of life and spiritual freedom I 
6 



VIII. 

MODIFIED CALVIOTSM, OR, REMAINDERS OF FREEDOM 
IN MAN.' 



What is freedom, and how much of freedom, if any, is left to us in our 
unregenerate state? Dr. Shedd has well said that the answer to tbis ques- 
tion, more than to any other, determines a man's position in theology. I 
have become convinced that the tbeory of Jonathan Edwards, with which 
Calvinism is so often identified, is in certain respects, too narrow a one to 
embrace all the facts, and that Calvin himself, as well as Augustine before 
him, held a somewhat broader and a more Scriptural view of human liberty. 
As I propose, however, to test the subject in my own way, and as Edwards. 
Calvin, Augustine, and their particular opinions, are of little account except 
as they may guide us to the truth or warn us of error, I will for the present 
leave them to themselves and will come at the real subject of investigation 
from another quarter. 

We cannot properly estimate man's freedom in his estate of sin without 
comparing it with some ideal standard. What is man's normal freedom? 
In a perfect moral state how will this freedom manifest itself? Two or 
three answers at once suggest themselves. The highest freedom is not 
simply an absence of external or internal constraint — of the necessity of 
willing evil. Nor is it a mere self-determining indecision, evenly balanced 
between good and evil, and equally ready to walk upon the heights of virtue 
or to plunge into the abyss of sin. It is rather such an inworking of law 
into the heart and soul of a man, that there is a spontaneous and infallible 
choosing of the right. The German poet did well when he rejected every 
vestige of moral indecision from his notion of freedom : — 

" In vain shall spirits that are all unbound 
To the pure heights of perfectness aspire; 
In limitation first the Master shines, 
And law alone can give us liberty." 

No instructed Christian can fail to see, moreover, that the law which is 
thus inwrought into man's heart and soul must be "the law of the Spirit of 
life," and not something merely abstract and impersonal. True freedom, 
in other words, involves an indwelling and inworking of God in man. 
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there, and there only, is liberty. There is 
no true freedom of the human spirit but in being the conscious, voluntary 
executor of the will of the Infinite One ; aye. more than this, in being inter- 
penetrated, informed and energized by the living God. "Here." in the 
language of a noted writer, "is the Christian paradox. I am to feel myself 



Printed in the Baptist Review. April, 1SS3. 
114 



MODIFIED CALVINISM. 115 

passive In the hands of God, yet on that very account the more intensely 
active. I am to be moved unresistingly by God, like the most inert instni' 
ment or machine, yet to be Col- that very reason all the more instinct with 
life and motion. My whole moral frame and mechanism is to be possessed 
and occupied by God, and worked by God, and yet through that very work- 
ing of God in and upon my inner man, I am to be made to apprehend more 
than ever my own inward liberty and power. This is the true freedom of 
the will of man, and then only is my will truly free, when it becomes the 
engine for working out the will of God." 

If this be the true notion of freedom in man's state of perfection — if, even 
at man's best, there can be no freedom without God — can man in his fallen 
state be less dependent? We grant that man can work evil without God, 
but can he work anything which is truly good? Surely not. In a fallen 
state man is solely responsible for evil, but not he alone is to be credited 
with good. That is due to God. Good King Alfred, with lab >ring quaint- 
ness of phrase, tried to express this truth more than a thousand years ago : 
" When the good things of this life are good, then they are good through 
the goodness of the good man who worketh good with them, and he is good 
through God." But the fountain-head of all this doctrine is in the utter- 
ance of the Apostle Paul: "Work out your own salvation with fear and 
trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his 
good pleasure." 

And yet, if Paul were not an inspired apostle, such an utterance might 
seem a piece of sublime audacity. Here are two truths, so far as human 
reason can see, irreconcilable with each other, yet both asserted in the same 
breath and without the slightest intimation that the apostle is aware of any 
contradiction between them. Divine sovereignty and efficiency on the one 
hand, and human freedom and responsibility on the other. God the worker 
of all good, yet man called upon to work out his own salvation. We are 
usually content to hold each of these truths at different times, and we are 
greatly perplexed when we are required to grasp both of them together. 
We are like the child who tries at the same moment to hold in its little hand 
two oranges. It can hold one, but so surely as it attempts to take up the 
other, it is compelled to drop the first. So God's working and man's work- 
ing are both of them truths, but our intellects are too infantile as yet to be 
able at once to grasp them both. 

Cecil once said in substance that the preacher who preached the whole 
truth of God would sometimes be accused of being a hyper-Calvinist ; and 
that the preacher who preached the whole truth of God would at other times 
be accused of being an out and out Arminian. And F. W. Robertson is but 
the type of a multitude of candid thinkers, when he tells us that he was in 
great trouble so long as he sought to discover the bond of connection between 
God's sovereignty and. man's free-agency, and that he found rest only when 
he finally determined that both were true, and that he would preach them 
both, but that he would forever give over any attempt to understand or to 
explain the relation between them. 

But Paul stands on a loftier height than either Cecil or Robertson. What 
to us seems contradiction, is to him as if it were not. He seems to discern 
the inner harmony between the divine and the human activities. He walks 



116 MODIFIED CALVINISM, OR, 

with firm and elastic step along the edge of those fathomless abysses of 
thought, and, as for the depths of mystery, he does not even notice them. 
For my part I count it a proof of his inspiration. No merely human tongue 
could thus speak of the problem of the ages without eltort to speculate or 
explain. I cannot understand Paul's calm declaration of the twofold truth 
without supposing that God lifted Paul up to something like his own divine 
point of view, and then enabled Paul to speak as the oracles of God. 

While the ordinary reader of Scripture has contented himself with hold- 
ing each of these truths alternately, the makers of theological systems have 
very often tried to do better, and to embrace both in a rightly proportioned 
and organic whole. But we have to confess that, owing to the limitations 
of the human intellect which I have already alluded to, whether these be 
original and permanent, or superinduced by sin and destined to gradual 
removal, the success of the systematizers has been far from complete. They 
have been constantly tempted to purchase a seeming unity by a partial 
ignoring of the one or the other element of the problem. Many a scheme 
of doctrine has been built up upon the single datum of human freedom. 
Freedom itself has been defined as the liberty of indifference, the soul's 
power to act without motive or contrary to the strongest motive, and such 
freedom has been declared to be the measure of obligation. The result has 
been the denial of all responsibility for our native depravity, all certainty of 
man's universal sinfulness and dependence upon Christ, all permanence of 
holy character in the redeemed or of unholy character in the lost, all prede- 
termination or even foreknowledge by God of human free acts or final des- 
tinies — a self-dependent, self -righteous religion, in which the glory is given 
to man, not to God. 

And then, on the other hand, many a system has been built upon the 
single datum of God's sovereignty, and man's freedom has been recognized 
only in name. Because God works all and in all, man's working has been 
ignored, and the human will has been made only the passive instrument of 
the divine efficiency and purpose. The result has been that human individ- 
uality has been lost sight of; the personality of man has beeu merged in 
the totality of the race; the race itself is but the automatic executor of an 
eternal decree ; conscience is lulled to sleep ; responsibility becomes a 
dream ; sin is no longer guilt, but misfortune ; men are saved or lost, no 
longer because of what they are or what they do, but only because it was so 
determined from eternity. A faith like this may have in it some grain of 
truth, and may be far better than no religion at all, but it is dangerously 
defective. It plays into the hands of modern materialism with its profess- 
edly scientific refutation of the freedom of the will ; and if it cannot be just- 
ly called pantheistic, it is only because the necessitarian element in it is not 
carried to its logical consequences. Let it have its way unchecked and 
unchallenged, and Christianity becomes a dead orthodoxy, whose doadnoss 
is evinced by indolence and immorality of life. 

Now it is this last error which in certain quarters is most prevalent, and 
which it is my present purpose to test by an appeal to Scripture and to con- 
sciousness. But before I do this, it is important to notice that, in the pas- 
sage which I just now quoted, the apostle Paul does not urge human duty 
by denying or undervaluing the divine activity. He does not inculcate man's 



REMAINDERS OF FREEDOM IN MAN. 117 

work by disparaging God's. Nay, he not only recognizes both, but he bases 
the duty of the former upon the fact of the latter — "Work out your owu 
salvation," he tells us, "for it is God that worketh in you." As between 
the Calvinistic and the Arminian scheme then, the Calvinistic is much the 
better, for it presents the more fundamental truth, the truth which human 
nature tends most to deny, the truth which we need most to recognize. 
An awe-inspiring view of God's working will nerve the soul, so that inaction 
will be impossible. It is not true, conversely, that a strong conviction of 
human power will lead to dependence upon God. The Scotch Covenanters 
knew what practical religion was. The English Church of the eighteenth 
century hardly did. 

And the difference was determined largely by their creeds. To know that 
God is at work in us gives hope and courage. All things are possible to him 
who believes in this. But to be thrown back upon self and the strength of 
my unstable will for my security of salvation, this is weakening and depress- 
ing. Therefore Paul tells us that in our very working we are to recognize 
already the working of God and the pledge of victory. No synergism here ; 
no recognition of an equal partnership between man and God, much less of 
a cooperation to be symbolized by a ' tandem ' team in which man leads aud 
God follows; nor a "working out," on man's part, of what God, on his part, 
"works in." All this misses the point entirely. Paul's idea is that God is 
in all, and man in all, so that man is to go forward joyfully, in the faith 
that every movement is the revelation of a divine energy within him. and 
that his success is not by might or power of his own, but by the Spirit of 
the Lord. Whatever stage of progress he shall reach, he shall know that in 
some true sense it is God who has wrought all his works in him, that unto 
these very works he has been created in Christ Jesus, according to the eter- 
nal ordination of God, and therefore he shall ever cry: "Not unto us, not 
unto us, but unto thy name give glory!" 

Having thus vindicated my position as a genuine Calvinist, I wish to 
point out certain limitations of this doctrine of divine agency. And the first 
is that while God is said to be the worker of all good, he is not said to be 
the worker of all evil. There has been a hyper-Calvinism that has practi- 
cally taught this. It has made God the only actor in the universe. Because 
all things are included in his plan, it has been supposed that he must work 
all by his actual efficiency- And when it has been objected that this must 
make God the direct author of sin in human hearts, and that the responsi- 
bility of sin is thus transferred from man to God, such men as Hop- 
kins and Emmons have responded that the moral quality of action does not 
depend upon its cause, but only upon its nature. 

It is difficult to find words strong enough to express the instinctive indig- 
nation of the unsophisticated mind at this slanderous imputation upon God, 
and at the perverse reasoning with which it is supported. Is it possible to 
suppose that a human being, created with a will set against holiness aud 
efficiently caused to exercise his evil propensities, would still be responsible 
for the possession of this will and for the exercise of these propensities? 
Yet this must be true, if the moral quality of activity does not at all depend 
upon its cause. God might make a man evil ; and yet for this evil, not God, 
but man, might be responsible. This cannot be. We can hold man respon- 



118 MODIFIED CALVINISM, OR, 

sible for his evil nature, only upon tbe assumption that man Is himself in 
some proper sense the originator of it. I do not now inquire whether there 
may not be a race-unity and a race-responsibility in virtue of which human- 
ity is an organic whole, and constitutes one moral person before God. I 
only claim that no man's evil dispositions can be accounted guilty unless 
their origin can be traced back to some self-determined transgression, com- 
mitted either in his individual capacity or in his connection with the race. 
We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated, or have had a part 
in originating.* Iudeed there is no other sin than this. Sin is never God's 
work, but always man's. Within the bounds of the human race — and of 
this only we are speaking — sin is not caused by beings or by things outside 
of us. It is due, neither directly to God's efficiency, nor indirectly to the 
circumstances in which God has placed us. Man's sin comes from himself, 
and each man is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed. 

The view just combated, although it strenuously asserts the personality 
of God, is virtually a system of fatalism. Man's acts are all determined for 
him from without. Not only the natural power which is used in performing 
them, but their moral quality itself, is the result of God's efficient agency. 
Fortunately no extensive body of Christians has ever held this view. But 
there has been another view almost equally pernicious, and which still has 
great currency. It is the view that man's acts are all determined from with- 
in, so determined by his inborn tendencies and dispositions that his life is 
nothing but a necessary manifestation of inherited character. All action is 
simply an unfolding of the nature, and cannot be different from that nature 
in kind. Man's freedom is simply freedom to act conformably to his existing 
evil inclination. That inclination he has no power to modify or check. This 
view may be called determinism, as the former view was called fatalism. It 
grants a freedom to action, but denies a freedom from action. Man does as 
he pleases, but he cannot please differently. And yet, although the inborn 
tendencies determine the life by an absolute necessity, man is held respon- 
sible for his activities because they are determined not from without but 
from within. 

Now before indicating the precise point of error in this view, let us test it 
by certain well known facts of our experience. The theory denies the exist- 
ence of any power in man to check or to modify his prevailing inclination. 
The man's volitions must correspond with his evil nature. He has power to 
manifest his character in action, but he has no power to change his charac- 
ter. Is this true? The carnal mind is enmity to God. Must every man 
therefore commit the sin against the Holy Ghost? I do not ask whether the 
commission of this sin may not be expected in the case of every sinner who 



* Some would prefer to add: "or with the origination of which we have 
had sympathy." But aside from the obvious objection that to be guilty of 
sympathizing with another's sin is not precisely to be guilty of commuting 
that sin (the two are distinguished in Rom. 1:32), I cannot think that 
this explanation of the common guilt of the race gives their full and natural 
meaning to phrases in Rom. 5: 12-19, such as "for that all sinned" (aorist, 
v. 12); "through one trespass" (v. 18). Compare 1 Cor. 15:22; 2 Cor. 
5: 14. The vast majority of men have never individually heard of Adam's 
pin; how then can they be said to sympathize with it? Is not this a sinning 
like Adam, instead of sinning with him; a fall through individual tres- 
passes, rather than through the "one trespass" of the "one man?" 



REMAINDERS OF FREEDOM IX MAN. 119 

continues in wilful rebellion. I simply ask whether this sin against the 
Holy Ghost is to be expected, in the case of every sinner, at once, or at the 
beginning of his conscious transgression. You answer in the negative. You 
grant then that the sinner has power to avoid that sin- -that in this case at 
least he has a freedom from, as well as a freedom to. Is this freedom whol- 
ly the result of special grace? Then if, apart from extraordinary influences 
of the Holy Spirit, this sin against the Holy Ghost would uniformly be com- 
mitted at the first moment of moral consciousness, are not all moral condi- 
tions short of that sin solely due to God, and is not every man practically as 
guilty as if he had already committed it? But this seems clearly inconsist- 
ent with the special guilt attaching to its commission. Why is it that, un- 
like fallen angels, man has yet to commit a sin which will put him beyond 
the reach of mercy? We seem compelled to recognize here a remnant of free- 
dom. Man is not borne on irresistibly by his evil nature, so that apart from 
the special power of God he must at once and inevitably commit the sin 
against the Holy Ghost. 

Apply the principle still further. We must grant that even the uuregen- 
erate man has power to choose a less degree of sin instead of a greater; he 
can refuse altogether to yield to certain temptations ; he can do outwardly 
good acts with imperfect motives ; he can even seek God from considerations 
of self-interest. We do not claim that the unregenerate man can do any act, 
however insignificant, which can fully meet God's approval or answer the 
demands of his law. Much less do we claim that the unregenerate man can 
of himself change his fundamental preference for self and sin into a supreme 
love for God. But then, while we recognize inborn tendencies to evil and 
a bent of will contracted by persistent transgression, it is of great import- 
ance to remember that this is not the whole of the man. There is a residuum 
of power by which he may render himself more or less depraved. No man 
will be condemned in the final judgment solely because of what he was born 
with — judgment shall be rendered according to the deeds done in the body. 

It is not true that the only probation is the probation of the race in Adam. 
There is an individual probation also, in which each man decides his destiny. 
Those who are shut out from God's mercy, at the last, will be shut out be- 
cause they would not come to him that they might have life. Human existence 
in this world is not a mere spontaneous development of evil. As all men 
have freedom in thinking— as all men can suspend the action of mere asso- 
ciation and can select the objects of their thought in matters that are merely 
secular — so, in matters of the soul, when God's claims are presented to the 
intellect, there is a power in every sinner to suspend present evil action and 
judgment and to fasten attention upon the considerations which urge obedi- 
ence to God. If we say that in the absence of love for holiness there is no 
motive for even this slight and preliminary attention to the truth, I answer 
that there is still a natural propension toward abstract truth, besides the 
admonitions of conscience and the impulses of self-interest, which may be 
appealed to in the case of every sinner who has not yet sinned the sin unto 
death and said with Satan: "Evil, be thou my good!" And, that this nat- 
ural self-interest is not in itself sinful, God himself shows when he addresses 
the warnings and invitations of his word both to men's hopes and to men'a 
fears. 



120 MODIFIED CALVINISM, OB, 

In the old Greek tragedy the Furies pursued men to wretched deaths, 
because these men had unwittingly committed some offense against divine 
or human law. Oedipus can say that his evil deeds have been sulTered rather 
than done. But Christian ethics is obliged to found responsibility upon 
freedom. Somewhere we must find an originating act, which we either our- 
selves committed or in which we had a part. Somewhere we must find a 
point where we can say: It might have been otherwise. In everything 
which the conscience recognizes as sin, the plea of absolute necessity bars 
all guilt, remorse, or punishment. And here is the error of that form of 
Calvinism which it is my present object to criticize. It is the error of put- 
ting In the link of necessity between man's fundamental disposition and his 
individual choices. Volitions are conceived of as mere hands upon the dial, 
that indicate the internal structure of the clock. Will has no power to react 
upon the interior mechanism, and so change the direction or kind of its 
movement. Upon this view there should be no power of suspending evil 
action in any given case, no power of directing the attention to opposing 
considerations, no power of summoning up motives to good, no power of 
seeking help from God. 

In this respect it seems to me that we are called upon to retreat from Jon- 
athan Edwards' philosophy to the position of Scripture. Edwards held 
that volition must always follow inclination, and that an act of will contrary 
in its nature to the soul's fundamental preference was inconceivable and 
impossible.* But Adam was created in righteousness and true holiness — 
how was it possible that Adam could ever fall? The Christian's deepest love 
is love for God — how is it possible that the Christian can ever sin ? Here 
are cases where the volitions are not mere manifestations of the soul's fun- 
damental preference. How will Jonathan Edwards explain them? He does 
::ot pretend to explain them. You may look his works through, and find no 
solution of the problem. These are outlying facts which could not be recon- 
ciled with his theory of the will, and their existence proves his theory 
insufficient, however correct in its main features it may be. 

Both Calvin and Augustine were broader than Edwards. They held that 
Adam at least had a power of contrary choice — not that he could choose 
good and choose evil at the same time, but that he had power to change his 
choice of good into a choice of evil — a power which he actually exercised 
in the fall. The race which fell in him has indeed lost the power to change 
its moral condition by an act of will, but its present state is referable to a 
free act in which, in the person of its first father, it consciously and wick- 



♦Edwards, it is true, calls this necessity a "philosophical necessity." and 
insists that he means by the phrase nothing more nor less than certainty 
(Freedom of the Will, p. 10). But there are passages in his treatise which 
imply much more than this. For example, he ascribes to future free acts the 
same necessity that belongs to an act done in the past (p. 77). Motive 
is cause, and renders other volition than the one put forth causeless and 
impossible. Motive acts as inevitably as a mechanical cause, and volition 
is its effect, passively produced or modified (p. 53). "The will, at the time 
of that diverse or opposite leading act or inclination and when actually 
under the influence of it, is not able to exert itself to the contrary, to make 
an alteration in order to a compliance" — a sentence which is either mean- 
ingless, or means that a man cannot change any inclination or purpose 
which he has once formed. 



REMAINDERS OF FREEDOM IN MAN. 121 

edly apostatized from God. Calvin * and Augustine f both recognized, as 
Edwards never did, that, in spite of this transgression of the race in A dam 
and the inherited depravity that has resulted therefrom, each individual has 
a power of his own to check and to modify his evil nature and to make him 
self more or less guilty in the sight of God. Man is not wholly a develop- 
ment of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. The corrupt tree, 
says Augustine, may produce the wild fruit of morality, though it cannot 
produce the divine fruit of grace. There is still left a power to resist 
depravity and to attend to truth, just as the Christian man lias still left a 
power to put forth evil volitions which contradict the governing dispouitiofc 
of his soul. 

It is a great gain to doctrine and to conduct when we learn that chatacter 
does not absolutely bind us. Christian character does not bind the Chris 
tion to be holy. Adam's and Satan's originally holy character did not abso- 
lutely bind them. They had power not only to choose ways of acting out 
their fundamental choice, but they had power of changing that choice. Not 
only had they power to choose between different expressions of motive, but 
they had power to choose between motives themselves. Both in the fall and 
at conversion there is such a new choice of motive. Motives are not pioperly 
causes, but only occasions, of our action. The man himself is the cause. 
Motives do not compel, they rather persuade, the will. The will acts in 
view of motives. And so we may give a new definition of free agency, con- 
sidered as a condition of responsibility, and as distinguished from that spir- 
itual freedom first-mentioned which is identical with perfect conformity to 
the divine law. Free agency — to give a formula which will apply to all 
responsible beings, perfect and imperfect, fallen and unfallen — is the soul's 
power to choose between motives, and to direct its subsequent activities 
according to the motive thus chosen. 

In secular concerns, this choice between motives is no uncommon thing. 
We know what it is to choose a profession, and we know that this choice is 
a very different thing from the following of the profession thus chosen. In 
religious concerns this choice between motives is the event of a lifetime, 
whether it be the one decision for good in the lifetime of the individutl, or 
the one decision for evil in the lifetime of the race. That decision once 
made, and the motive whether good or evil once chosen, affection and habit 
will make it harder and harder to change the decision and to reverse the 



♦Calvin, Inst. Rel. Ch., 1 : 15 : 8 — "Man was endowed with free will 
by which, if he had chosen, he might have obtained eternal life. Adam 
could have stood if he would, since he fell merely by his own will ; but, 
because his will was flexible to either side and he was not endowed with 
constancy to preserve, therefore he so easily fell. Yet his choice of good 
and evil was free : and not only so, but his mind and will were possessed of 
consummate rectitude, and all his organic parts were rightly disposed to 
obedience, till destroying himself, he corrupted all his excellencies." * * * 
"It would have been unreasonable that God should be confined to this condi- 
tion, to make man so as to be altogether incapable either of choosing or of 
committing any sin." 

t Augustine, De Correptione et Gratia, c. 13 — "While all men are evil, 
they have through free will added [to original sin] some more, some less." 
De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, 2: 1 — "Added to the sin of their birth sins 
of their own commission." 2:4 — " Neithe-r denies our liberty of will 
whether to choose an evil or a good life, nor attributes to it so much power 
that it can avail anything without God's grace, or that it can change it- 
self from evil to good." 



122 MODIFIED CALVINISM, OR, 

choice. Evil doing will give rise to a diseased .state in Which the will is so 
weak that it is certain never to break its bonds without divine help. Die 
that commits sin becomes the slave of sin, and will never emerge into free 
dom until Christ stretches out his hand to deliver. But even this certainty 
of continuous evil activity is not necessity; and the fact that this evil activ- 
ity is self-originated and self-maintained is an all-sufficient ground of 
responsibility and condemnation both in conscience and before God's bar 

In Julius Miiller's "Doctrine of Sin" there is frankly recognized, both in 
the individual and in the race as a whole, an already existing determination 
to evil. There is a bent of the will, prior to individual volitions, which can- 
not be explained as mere habit, and which amounts to an active preference 
of selfishness and sin. Thus far Julius Miillcr grants to determinism an 
element of truth. But then he declares that this existing determination to 
evil is partly limited by the will's remaining power of choice, and is partly 
traceable to a former self-determination. In my judgment the great German 
theologian has given us the best extant discussion of the subject, and with 
his conclusions, so far as man's present state is concerned. I substantially 
agree. I recognize such a thing as character — affections set in the direction 
of wrong or right, and endowed with power to persuade the will — and that 
with infallible certainty — because the will itself has made them what they 
are, and even now cherishes them. Even in the case of congenital bia< 
toward evil we are responsible for the evil affections we inherit, because we 
are not simply individuals, but also members of a common humanity, Which 
in its first father determined itself against God. But the complementary 
truth must never be forgotten, that these affections, formed as they are, are 
still subject in some degree to will, and that will is continually under the 
necessity cither of resisting or of reaffirming them. The man's opportunity 
to choose between motives is a constant one, and whether he actually change 
his motive or not, he knows that he is not yet wholly deprived of his power 
to change it. 

Of course the objection will be raised that this choice between motives 
must be a choice without motive, and that such an act of pure will is neither 
conceivable nor rational. We grant, with Calderwood, that an act of pure 
will is unknown in consciousness. There is no volition without motive, no 
putting forth of power without a reason for its exercise. We even dissent 
from Calderwood, when, very inconsistently with his statement already- 
mentioned, he ascribes to will, in the initial act of attention, a freedom from 
the influence of motive. We maintain, on the contrary, that everywhere 
and always the will acts only in view of motives, and that the theory of lib- 
erty which represents will as existing in an undetermined state, or as deter- 
mining itself without motive or against the strongest motive, is repugnant 
both to consciousness and to reason. The choice to attend to considerations 
prompting a different course from that which we are now pursuing, is never 
made but for a reason, and that reason may be found both in instincts from 
within and in incitements from without. Motives are commonly compounded 
of external presentations and of internal dispositions. In freely choosing 
between motives, the man is influenced by motives — by one motive more 
than by another ; otherwise motives are a mere impertinence, and the man 
may make up his decision entirely without them. There can always be found 



REMAINDERS OF FREEDOM IN MAN. 123 

a reason for changing from one motive to another, aye, even in the case o! 
capricious acts so-called, where the reason is simply the gratification of a 
lawless independence. 

A reason, but not a cause. A persuasive influence, but not a constraining 
power. The cause, the power, are in the free will that chooses. That will 
infallibly chooses according to motive, but it is not determined by motive. 
Will is itself the determiner. Here is an act of absolute origination — an act 
i explicable to the logical understanding. With Sir William Hamilton, we 
accept the fact that the will is an undetermined cause, upon the simple tes- 
timony of consciousness. But it may be questioned whether the whole 
difficulty in the case does not arise from taking the word motive in a mechan- 
ical si use. and from forgetting that the motive is nothing but the man. All 
motive is in the last analysis internal. Motive is simply the man in a cer- 
tain state of feeling or desire. And will is nothing but this same man 
choosing. 

The man may have many desires, and therefore many motives, some lower, 
some higher, but prior to his decision no one of these motives may be strong- 
er than another. It is the soul's choosing to yield to the one rather than to 
the other that gives that one its strength. It becomes the prevailing motive 
only by the soul's determining to follow it and identify itself with it. As 
before choice it may be said that the motive was only the man, so after 
choice it may be said that the man is nothing but his motive — at least until 
at some new epoch of his experience, he gives himself up to some new 
impulse that clamors for control. So man is not a creative first cause, for 
the reason that he only chooses between impulses previously existing — a 
drop of water, as a French writer has said, which chooses whether it will 
flow into the Rhine or into the Rhone. The forces that bear it onward are 
not of its own making, any more than the drop of water makes the force of 
gravitation. Man can choose his direction only, whether toward holiness 
or unholiness, Satan or God, heaven or hell. Yet, determining what his 
motive shall be, he determines his character, that is, he determines himself : 
he is in the highest sense self-determined, and therefore solely responsible, 
not only for his present character, but for all the executive acts which flow 
therefrom.* 

Man is one, and desire and will always go together. They act and react 
upon each other. The will may strengthen or weaken the desires by direct- 
ing the attention to or from the objects adapted to excite them. Man may 
thus to a certain extent change his course and modify his character. The. 



* Since writing the above I find in the Princeton Review for 1856, pp. 
514, 515, an extended notice of William Lyall's Intellect, Emotions and 
Moral Nature (Edinburgh, Constable & Co., 1S55). From that work the 
following lines are quoted with approval: "The will follows reasons, in- 
ducements, but it is not caused. It obeys, or its acts under inducement, 
but it does so sovereignly." . . . . "It exhibits the phenomena of activity 
in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it rather than another. 
It determines in reference to it that this is the very motive which it will 
obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited, the will obeying, 
but elective, active ia its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible, 
how the will can be under the influence of motive and yet possess an intel- 
lectual activity, we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena 
which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained." So we may add 
that in all fundamental choices the object chosen and the motive for choos- 
ing are one and the same thing. 



124 MODIFIED CALVINISM, OR, 

desires in turn act upon the will and influence its decisions, without however 
destroying its power to accept or reject their suggestions. Which cornea 
first, desire or will? It is like asking: "Which comes first, strength or 
exercise? In this last case, we should answer: Either may come first. 
Strength usually comes first, and is the condition of exercise. But there are 
cases when strength is greatly reduced, and only exercise will restore it. 
Then exercise comes before strenutli. So, in the case of oar ordinary action, 
desire seems to precede will; in the crises of our history, will seems to pre- 
cede desire. 

In the cognition of beauty, who can tell which goes before, the intellect 
ual apprehension or t lie state of the sensibility? Do you say the man must 
first know, in order to feel? Chronologically, yes -for his feeling must 
have an object, and this the intellect must furnish. Logically, no — for no 
man can see a beauty which he does not love; and the taste conditions the 
intellectual apprehension. So both desire and will are involved in every 
moral act; each affects the other. Yet in certain acts the one element may 
be more prominent than the other, the one may precede the other. Logi- 
cally, desire may come first ; but chronologically, will. 

The views presented in this paper are partly intended to constitute a sup- 
plement and modification of those advocated by the author in the article 
which precedes this. That there may be no mistake with regard to their 
nature, let me here sum up what has been said thus far, and distinguish my 
position as precisely as possible from other schemes with which it might be 
confounded. As to original sin. The race is organically one. When 
Adam sinned and fell, all there was of human nature sinned and fell in him. 
By an act of free will he corrupted his nature, and all his posterity possess 
by inheritance that nature which corrupted itself in him. Adam's act of 
will was an act of permanent choice, and we partake of it. The result of 
that act was a depraving of his affections, and we partake of them. I reject 
however that division of the human powers which classes affections under 
the head of will. I would speak of voluntary affections only in the sense 
that the will has originated, and that the will continues to cherish, these af- 
fections. Both in the case of Adam and in the case of his posterity, the 
settled choice of self as the end of living, and the evil affections which result 
therefrom, involve a moral inability to do right or to obey God, while yet 
the natural ability remains. Man can change his evil desire, but he has no 
desire to change. The can-not is simply a will-not; though, until the Spirit 
of God deliver him, that will-not is a bondage as terrible and remorseless as 
any imprisonment behind iron bars. But it is a bondage for which the sin- 
ner is responsible and guilty, because it consists in nothing but his own 
active choice of evil. 

Not all sin then is personal. There was a first race-sin, in which man's 
will and affections freely and wickedly contracted a perverse bent and incli- 
nation. Only by identifying ourselves with Adam, can we account for our 
birth with evil dispositions for which both conscience and Scripture hold us 
guilty. But now, as to titan's remaining freedom. Neither Adam nor his 
posterity in that first act of sin lost their natural power of will, though they 
did lose their inclination to will conformably to God's law. There was still 
in the case of Adam — there is still in Ihe rnsr- of his po^tf rity — a power to 



REMAINDERS OF FREEDOM IN MAN. 128 

chock the manifestations of evil inclination, and at least indirectly and with 
imperfect motives to seek its reversal. It is within man's power to be more 
or less corrupt in his outward life, and to use with more or less faithfulness 
the outward means of grace. Inborn character docs not so bind a man that 
he has no individual probation. He has still the freedom which consists in 
choosing between motives ; and inasmuch as this choice is not without motive 
but is made for a reason, there is previous certainty of an evil choice, while 
yet the soul has perfect power to make a right one. Thus I would exclude 
both the hyper-Calvinistic determinism which would make the life of each 
individual simply the evolution of his inherited depravity, and also the 
Arminian theory of the uncertainty of human action which would make it 
impossible for God either to foreordain or to foreknow the future. 

Although the Scriptures teach that God only can give the new heart, sin- 
ners are exhorted in Scripture to make to themselves a new heart. Regen- 
eration is plainly not a mechanical work of God, but a work of personal 
influence upon the sinner's affections. Nor is it an influence exerted only 
through the truth, as if man were the only agent, and moral suasion were 
the only method God could employ to change man's will. We repel the 
notion that the only communication between spirit and spirit is through 
truth; for this is a virtual denial of the Christian's union with Christ and of 
God's personal communion with the human soul. We know of an influence 
exerted by the orator, which is above and beyond that of the words he 
speaks. We know of a power of personal influence, that passes that of 
argument. There is a subtle magnetism in the presence of a noble friend, 
that disarms objection and opens the heart to his persuasions ere we are 
aware. There is an atmosphere of purity and truth and love enwrapping 
some devoted souls, that draws us to them and makes us trust everything 
they say. Aye, there seem to be subtle laws, only obscurely understood as 
yet, in accordance with which soul comes into contact with soul, and acts 
directly upon soul, though sundered far by space, and deprived of all physi- 
cal intermediaries. So Christ's entrance into the soul and joining himself 
to it has power to change the heart. The renewing Spirit is the Spirit of 
Christ, and in that new contact of the human spirit with the divine, the soul 
is transformed into the image of him who first created it. 

But this personal presence of Christ does not constrain or compel. 
Rather is there a new consciousness of strength and a new sense of freedom. 
Lifted up into this new divine companionship, and penetrated with this new 
divine life, there is a soul-absorbing penitence for sin and submission to the 
Savior. God's working in the soul to will and to do, has for its result and 
accompaniment the soul's working-out of its own salvation. The great 
change which, looked at from the divine side, we call regeneration, when 
looked at from the human side, may be called conversion. Regeneration 
has logical, but not chronological, precedence of conversion. Man turns 
only as God turns him, indeed ; but it is equally true that man is never to 
wait for God's working. If he is ever regenerated, it must be in and through 
a movement of his own will, in which he turns to God as unconstrainedly, 
and with as little consciousness of God's operation upon him, as if no such 
operation of God were involved in the change. And, in preaching, we are 
to press upon men the claims of God and their duty of immediate submission 



12G MODIFIED CALVINISM. OR, 

to Christ, with the certainty that they who do so submit will subsequently 
recognize tbis new and holy activity of their own wills as due to the working 
within them of divine power. 

So we come back at last to the point from which we set out. The freedom 
which consists in the power to choose between motives is to be so used under 
grace that we may through it enter into that higher freedom which consists 
in the glad surrender of all our powers to God. In the fall man lost the 
latter, while he retained the former. Only the grace of God can restore that 
harmony of the human will with the law of holiness, for which man MM 
originally made. Formal freedom, as the Germans call the mere power to 
put forth single volitions externally conformed to law, is not enough. Man 
needs real freedom, by which phrase those same Germans designate the 
power to love God with all the heart, and so, to live according to the idea 
of man's being. This real freedom, this freedom in the highest sense, is 
partially restored in regeneration ; it will be perfectly restored when we 
awake in Christ's likeness. In the case of the saints in heaven, the formal 
freedom will be merged in the real and will be made the organ for its mani- 
festation, as it is in the case of God himself, and they shall be perfect even 
as their Father in heaven is perfect. The highest freedom involves a cer- 
tainty of holy character and of holy action, for it is a state in which mind 
and heart and will, all the outgoing powers and all the inner being, are set, 
without the shadow, of a fear or the chance of wavering, in one pure and 
everlasting fixedness of devotion to duty and of likeness to God. 

And so, faith leads to freedom. The soul at one with God and inspired 
by God becomes a centre of force in the universe, an originator and com- 
municator of holy influence in the highest sense in which this is possible to 
the creature. In becoming the servants of Christ we become the Lord's 
freemen, for only he whom the Son makes free is free indeed. But another 
use of our formal freedom is possible. We may use it to rivet yet more 
tightly the manacles of sense and sin, so that escape, from being difficult, 
becomes hopeless. We may make ourselves the slaves of selfishness, the 
sport of passion, mere waifs upon the roaring sea of circumstance, mere 
passive and brute tools of the evil oue. Now for a time there is possible a 
turning of the thoughts to God and to the motives for repentance. But the 
day will come when character will become indurated, when self-interest will 
be of less account than hatred to God, when there will be no motives longer 
to which even God can appeal in order to save. So the soul, which was 
meant to have a potency second only to God's, becomes impotent. In losing 
God it has lost itself. It has used its remainder of freedom only to reiterate 
and confirm the first evil choice of humanity and to put real freedom per- 
manently beyond its reach. While the righteous reign with God, true lords 
and free, the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind 
driveth away, helpless, worthless, outcast forever. 

The current tendency to believe in a probation after death must be con- 
sidered as a historical judgment upon the erroneous postulates of the so- 
called New England Theology. That theology is in its innermost principle 
atomistic. The race is nothing — the individual is all. Since there is no 
Tace-responsibility and no common guilt, a fair probation in the next world 
is demanded in the case of those who had had no individual or proper proba- 



REMAINDERS OF FREEDOM IN MAN. 127 

tion in this.* This method of reasoning cannot be met except by reaffirming 
the old truth which the New England theology has denied, namely that of 
a fair probation of the whole race in Adam, and the universal guilt and 
condemnation of mankind on account of its common fall in him. Whatever 
comes to us in the way of opportunity and privilege since that first sin, la 
of grace, not of debt. Our individual probation gives us more than a fair 
chance. And since no man has a right to demand this new chance at the 
hands of God, it is optional with God to how many it shall be extended, and 
how long it shall continue. As he has provided the redemption, it is for 
him to settle its terms. Scriptwre alone can determine when the day of 
grace shall end. And while Scripture seems to intimate that in the judg- 
ment none shall be condemned solely on account of the common sin of the 
race in Adam and that the grace of Christ shall avail to the salvation of all 
who have not consciously and personally transgressed, it seems to declare 
with equal plainness that the present is the last scene of probation, that 
there is a law written on the heart by which all men shall be tried, that even 
the heathen are without excuse, and that after the opportunities of this 
mortal state are over, there is a departure of each soul to its own place. 
whether that be one of sin or holiness, of happiness or misery- Here there 
are motives presented on either side, and every man has power either to 
resist the evil and guilty tendencies of the nature, with the certainty that 
such struggle will be aided and blessed of God, or to confirm the sinful 
affections, so that no influences which God can consistently use w r ill avail to 
save. And the decisions of this life are final. Will is not independent of 
motive, and all motives to good must be furnished by God. The wicked 
are indeed in the next world subjected to suffering. But suffering has in 
itself no reforming power. Unless accompanied by special renewing influ- 
ences of the Spirit of God it only hardens and embitters the soul. We have 
no Scripture evidence that such influences of the Spirit are exerted after 
death upon the still impenitent, but abundant evidence, on the contrary, 
that the moral condition in which death finds men, is their condition for- 
ever. After death, comes, not probation, but judgment, and there is a great 
gulf fixed between the righteous and the wicked, which finite spirits cannot 
pass, and which the grace of God will not. 

This then is the new Calvinism which I would advocate. It holds just as 
strongly as the old to God's initiative and to God's sovereignty in regenera- 
tion. God does not give the same influences to all, nor to any, all the 
influences which in his abstract omnipotence he can. There are influences 



* Dr. G. H. Emerson, a leading Universalist, in his "Doctrine of Pro- 
bation Examined" points out very forcibly this tendency of the New Eng- 
land theology. "The truth," he says, "at once of ethics and of Scripture, 
that sin is in its permanent essence a free choice, however for a time 
it may be held in mechanical combination with the notion of moral opportu- 
nity arbitrarily closed, can never mingle with it, and must in the logical 
outcome permanently cast it off." Dr. Newman Smyth, in his introduction 
to Dorner's Eschatology, suggests that we must either, with Julius Muller, 
find a fair probation in a pre-existent state, or else, with Dorner, grant one 
after death. Neither Dr. Emerson nor Dr. Smyth could reach their con- 
clusions, of Universal] sm and of future probation respectively, if they seri- 
ously held to the oneness of the race and its common fall in Adam. The 
doctrine of a fair probation of mankind at the beginning is needed to pre- 
vent the inference that there must be a further probation, if not universal 
salvation, in the world to come. 



128 MODIFIED CALVINISM. 

of his Spirit which may ho resisted. There are other influences which :ir« 
sufficient to secure acceptance of Christ, when without them men would 
persevere in iniquity and be lost. <Jod is not under bonds to give any of 
these to sinners, nor will he give them, after the short summer of this life is 
past. When he does give them in any degree, resistance on the part of the 
sinner involves a new guilt and condemnation. They will become effectua 1 
to no man's salvation, unless that man freely yield to the divine persuasion 
and choose for his supreme motive the love of God. We have emphasized 
hitherto the divine element in this great fundamental change. Let us not 
leave men in ignorance of the human element which the Scriptures connect 
inseparably with it. We have taught that God works in us to will and to 
do of his good pleasure. Let us teach also that men must work out their 
own salvation with fear and trembling. Only thus will the Christian learn 
that he must by perseverance prove his faith to be true. Only thus will the 
sinner learn that the whole guilt of his soul's destruction will rest upon him- 
self. For both the Christian and the sinner are exhorted to work, to strive, 
to seek. We are responsible not only for all we can do ourselves, but for all 
we can secure from God. God's work and man's work form one whole. Tc 
ignore God's work is to destroy our hope. To ignore man's work is tc 
destroy our responsibility. What God hath joined together, let not man 
put asunder. 



IX. 
MIRACLES, AS ATTESTING REVELATION/ 



The Christian religion claims the acceptance and obedience of all men 
upon the ground that it is a system of truth and duty revealed by God. It 
professes to give evidence that it is from God. It points to its internal char- 
acteristics as proof that it has come from God's wisdom ; it points to its 
external accompaniments as proof that it has come from God's power. By 
its internal characteristics we mean a supernatural adaptation to human 
wants, as attested by those who have really received it. By its external 
accompaniments, we mean a series of supernatural events attending its orig- 
inal publications, such as only God could work, and such as leave no reason- 
able doubt that the Author of nature is also the Author of the scheme of 
doctrine promulgated in his name. 

Among Christian apologists of the last quarter-century, there has been a 
tendency to lay the stress of argument upon the internal evidences. Much 
has been done to show the supernatural character of the Scripture teaching. 
The unity of revelation, the superiority of the New Testament system of 
morality, the conception of Christ's person and character presented there, 
the witness of Jesus to his own divinity and lordship, have all been adduced 
as proving its divine origin. But while we gratefully accept the results of 
these recent studies of the book itself, we must still record our belief that 
the internal evidence of Christianity is necessarily secondary and supple- 
mentary. Of itself and by itself, it is insufficient to substantiate the divine 
authority of the Christian system. 

For in the Christian system we include more than the New Testament 
morality ; we include all that teaching with regard to the divine nature and 
methods of dealing, in view of which we speak of Trinity, Incarnation, 
Atonement, Regeneration, Judgment, Immortality. Internal evidence might 
possibly suffice to secure acceptance of the Christian morality, for reason 
can recognize its sublime elevation ; but the doctrines which chiefly make 
the Bible what it is — a revelation of supernatural and saving truth — are all 
beyond the power of reason to discover, or even to demonstrate, after they 
have been made known. "Of what use," says Lessing, "would be a revela- 
tion that revealed nothing?" But if the Scriptures be in any proper sense 
a revelation, an unveiling of truth, which is above and beyond our natural 
powers, It is necessary that they be accompanied by some external proof 



* An Essay read before the Baptist Pastors' Conference of the State 

of New York, Binghamton, Oct. 23, 1STS, and printed in the Baptist Re- 
view, April, 1S79. 

9 129 






130 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES, OR, 

that they are from God; else the very greatness of tho truth may only per- 
plex and aiTrunt us. 

It has been suggested, indeed, that God's testimony to the truth of a reve- 
lation might be given not externally, but internally, by direct action of his 
spirit upon the mind, and that for this reason any external certification by 
miracles must be regarded as unnecessary. But can we be sure that the 
method of internal certification is the preferable one? It labors under cer- 
tain manifest disadvantages. It cannot in the nature of the case furnish so 
clear an evidence of its divine authorship. Being internal, how can it be 
known that it comes from a God external to the soul? What is needed is 
absolute certainty on the part of the recipient that the communication Is 
from such a God, and that the truth communicated is not subjective, but 
independent of the mind's consciousness of it. But it is essential to inward 
communications that to the person receiving them they appear, at least in 
the beginning, as original discoveries of his own. Only by reflection can it 
be determined that they come from without, not from within, and, in the case 
of doctrines or commands that stagger the reason, some other assurance than 
mere logic can give is absolutely needed to convince the recipient that these 
seeming communications from God are not the vagaries of his own brain. 
Thus we very naturally find Gideon begging for an outward sign that he is 
not self-deceived. Even in the case of the original recipient of a revelation, 
outward certification seems to confer an important advantage. But what is 
an advantage to the person to whom the revelation is first communicated, is 
an absolute necessity to the multitude to whom he proclaims his message. 
If his possession of new ideas of doctrine and duty is not proof even to him- 
self that these ideas are true, much less is it proof to others. Without some 
external sign that God has sent him, his mere declaration of the fact is utter- 
ly untrustworthy. As a communicator of new truth, of which reason Is in- 
competent to judge, he needs and he must have divine credentials before his 
word can bind the moral action of men. Is it said that God can make the 
same revelation at the same moment inwardly to the mind of each separate 
individual of the race? Granting this to be true, as an abstract proposition, 
is it not manifest that the methods of God's working are actually different 
from this? Great secular truths are first made the possession of some favored 
nation, and of some favored individual in that nation, in order that through 
the individual they may be imparted to the nation, and through the nation 
to mankind. So we may expect religious truths to be directly communi- 
cated by God, not to all, but to single members of the race, and then indi- 
rectly through their voice and testimony to the world. There is economy 
in the use of natural force ; shall there not be also economy of the super- 
natural? Shall we have exertions of supernatural power by the thousand 
million, in the internal life of all of earth's inhabitants, in order to communi- 
cate the divine ideas? And then, shall these be supplemented by miracles 
wrought in the case of each, to convince each that the original communica- 
tion is from God? Surely in place of a scheme of internal certification which 
requires for its execution such a multitude of supernatural acts, we may well 
prefer the plan of external certification which requires but few. If one act 
of divine certification will answer the purpose, we may believe that God will 
not employ a million. But a million are needed if internal evidence alone 



MIRACLES AS ATTESTING REVELATION. 131 

i> admissible, while upon :i plan which admits external evidence, we need 
!>nt a single one. In condescension to human weakness, God may give us 
more, yet it still remains true that a single miracle like that of Christ's res- 
urrection may substantiate the divine authority of all his claims and teach- 
ings, and bear upon its Atlantean shoulders the weight of Christianity itself. 

Nor is the defense of the Christian miracles an optional matter with those 
who accept the internal evidences. Pot the internal and the external are so 
inextricably interwoven, that loss of faith in the one involves loss of faith 
in the other. However impressive the doctrine of Scripture may be, if it be 
accompanied by falsehood in matters of fact, it is proved thereby to have 
not a divine but a human origin. But facts are not merely accompaniments 
here — they are the centre and core of its teaching. Its main doctrines 
claim to be facts as well as doctrines, and to be doctrines only because they 
are facts. The incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ are valuable for 
purposes of doctrine, only as they are first allowed to be facts of history. 
But such facts as these are miracles. And therefore Christianity stands 01 
falls with its miracles. As a scheme of faith and a method of salvation it 
has no claim upon us, unless the supernatural facts which constitute its 
essence, and by which it declares itself attested, were historical realities. 
If Jesus did not take human flesh in other than the common method of natu- 
ral generation, if he did not do works beyond all human or natural powers to 
accomplish, above all, if he did not rise from the dead, he is a proved impos- 
tor, his claim to be a teacher commissioned by God is falsified, and Christi- 
anity, as a system divinely authoritative and obligatory, exists no longer. 

While we urge, however, the primary importance of these external evi- 
dences of our religion, we would never sunder them from the internal. 
There is something of truth in the maxim of Pascal, that the miracles prove 
the doctrine and the doctrine proves the miracles. The two go together. 
Miracles do not stand alone as evidences. Power alone cannot prove a 
divine commission. Purity of life and doctrine must go with the miracles 
to assure us that a religious teacher has come from God. The miracles and 
the doctrine mutually supplement each other and form parts of one whole. 
The absence of either would throw suspicion upon the teacher who failed to 
produce it. In the case of apparently supernatural works wrought by a 
teacher of flagrant immorality, any explanation would be preferable to hold- 
ing that they were wrought by God. We are even willing to grant that over 
certain minds and certain ages the internal evidence may have greater power 
than the external. It is probable that men in the present generation are 
more frequently led from faith in the transforming efficacy of the Christian 
religion to faith in its outward facts, than through the reverse process. Still 
we must not be blinded to the fact that the order of chronological apprehen- 
sion is not necessarily the order of logical connection and dependence. The 
internal evidences have power to convince, only because the external facts 
are assumed to be worthy of confidence; they lose all independent value 
so soon as the external facts are found to be without historical foundation. 
While therefore we claim other evidence than that of miracles, we hold that 
this is logically the prior and the more important. It has been well said that 
a supernatural fact is the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine, but a 
supernatural doctrine is not the proper proof of a supernatural fact. 



132 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES, OR, 

Nor do we, with these explanations, regard the Christian miracles as a 
burden rather than a support. To the beginner in geometry the first prop- 
osition is a burden until he has mastered it; then it becomes the firm basis 
and foundation of the second. So we hold that the possibility and proba- 
bility of miracles may be proved to the candid mind, and that the Christian 
miracles may be shown to be not incredible, but on the other hand to rest 
upon evidence sufficient to warrant rational conviction of their historical 
reality. So much having been done, the miracles will take their place as 
solid substructions of the edifice of doctrine ; we shall walk the upper floors 
with confidence because we know the foundation is secure. We are per- 
suaded that the very prevalent suspicion of the miraculous which so fre- 
quently prevents the acceptance of Christianity and prejudices even the 
examination of its records, ought to vanish before a reconsideration and 
restatement of the doctrine of miracles. That miracles have been in the 
least discredited is doubtless due in some degree to the partial view of the 
universe which modern physical science has given us. But other science 
has made progress likewise. The sciences of mind and of morals have right 
to be heard also. We are persuaded that one who embraces these as well 
as the science of matter in his scheme of knowledge, and who regards nature 
and the supernatural together as constituting the one system of God, ought 
to find no serious difficulty, either intellectual or practical, in the acceptance 
of the Christian miracles. 

But, not to anticipate, let us define at once what we mean by a miracle. 
We mean an event in nature, so extraordinary hi itself, and so coinciding 
with the prophecy or command of a religious teacher or leader, as fully to 
warrant the conviction on the part of those who witness it that God has 
wrought it with the design of certifying that this teacher or leader is com- 
missioned by him. Here are several elements, which, for the sake of dis- 
tinctness, it may be well to state separately. A miracle, then, is an event in 
nature. By nature we mean what is not God and what is not made in the 
image of God — in other words, the physical world. The realm of mind and 
will, inasmuch as this is free and not embraced in the chain of physical 
causation, is not a part of nature, but belongs to the supernatural. Regen- 
eration, therefore, as a spiritual work of God, does not occur in the realm 
of nature, and is not a miracle. A miracle is an event that can be witnessed. 
There is something in it that is palpable to the senses. In the restoration 
of sight to the blind, though the method of the wonder is not mauifest. the 
change from blindness to sight is visible. In resurrection of the dead, 
although the reentrance of the spirit into its mortal tenement is not matter 
of observation, the fact that the man was dead, and that now he lives again, 
is patent to all. But creation is not a miracle, because, among other rea- 
sons, there was no eye to witness it. 

Again, the miracle is an extraordinary event in nature. It cannot be 
explained as part of a series of regularly recurring sequences. It falls under 
no law of nature in the sense of being referable to any order of known facts. 
It is excepr ; oT>al, unique. If there be any law that regulates its occurrence, 
it is not a law which otherwise manifests itself in the present system of the 
physical universe. And yet the apparent want of connection with the pres- 
ent physical order is not so remarkable as the actual connection with another 



MIRACLES AS ATTESTING REVELATION. 133 

and higher domain — that of intelligence and will. For the mere description 
of the unique physical event does not complete the account of the miracle, 
else the falling of a meteoric stone might be a miracle. The miracle is a 
combination of two things — an extraordinary occurrence in nature, and the 
coinciding prophecy or command of a religious teacher. 

Still further, in the case of the miracle, the extraordinariness of the event 
and the prediction or command of the messenger are so connected, that our 
intuition of design leaves us no alternative but to infer that God is the author 
of the coincidence, and that, with the purpose of giving evidence that the 
messenger has been sent by him. Here we see the difference between mir- 
acle and special providence. In the latter the connection of the event with 
the religious purpose to be served thereby is not so close as to render an 
opposite explanation impossible. Some warrant is furnished for believing 
it designed for a particular religious end, but not what may be called full 
warrant. With the miracle it is otherwise. When Christ appeals to his 
works as evidences that the Father has sent him, and declares that, in still 
further testimony to this fact, he will rise from the dead on the third day, 
the believer in his resurrection must also be a believer in his commission 
from God, or else hold that God could and did work a miracle in support of 
falsehood. So inevitable is such a conclusion, that we find even Spinoza 
declaring that he would break his system in pieces and embrace without 
reluctance the ordinary faith of Christians, if he could once be persuaded 
of the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. 

It will be observed that in our definition we take no ground with regard 
to that much disputed question whether the miracle be a suspension or vio- 
lation of natural law, nor with regard to that other question as vigorously 
pressed of late, whether the miracle absolutely dispenses with all physical 
means and antecedents, and is the result simply of an immediate volition of 
God. It is our belief that the Christian miracles might be successfully 
defended, even if both these questions were answered in the affirmative. 
But on the other hand, it is our belief also, that Christian apologists have 
here allowed themselves too frequently to fight their battle upon ground 
chosen by their enemies. It was Hume who first stigmatized the miracle as 
■ violation or suspension of natural law, and the transgression of the order 
which God had himself appointed was declared to be the greatest of absurd- 
ities and enormities. But Scripture gives no sign that the miracle is thus 
conceived of by those who wrote it, nor is there the slightest necessity that 
we should accept Hume's assumption as to the method in which God must 
work, if he work at all. Again, it is too often taken for granted that mir- 
acle is equivalent to divine fiat, reaching its goal with absolute exclusion of 
natural means. But Scripture compels us to no such view. On the other 
hand it points to the East wind as the means by which the Red Sea was 
parted at the Exodus and leaves it not improbable that the sinking of a con- 
siderable area in Western Asia was the physical cause of the deluge, and a 
simoom of the desert the physical cause of the destruction of the host of 
Sennacherib. What was God's method here — what was his method in the 
working of any particular miracle, we do not know. We would have it dis- 
tinctly understood that we do not have and that we do not think it necessary 
to have, any particular theory as to the method of them. But when taa 



134 TI1F> CHRISTIAN MIRACLES, OR, 

opponents of the Christian miracles first identify our doctrine with their 
preconceived notions of it, and then triumph because they have, in their 
own estimation, proved those notions to be absurd, it is time for us to show- 
that other conceptions are at least possible. 

Miracles, we claim, may be wrought by God, while yet no physical law is 
suspended or violated. To sustain this proposition it is only necessary to 
refer to facts within the range of our common experience. We know that 
lower forces and laws in nature are counteracted and transcended by the 
higher, while yet tliese lower forces and laws are not suspended or annihi- 
lated, but are merged in the higher and made to assist in accomplishing 
results to which they are altogether unequal when left to themselves. Imag- 
ine, for example, that no forces or laws were in operation except the purely 
mechanical ones, such as gravitation and cohesion. In such a merely mechan- 
ical creation, let the reaction of carbonate of lime and sulphuric acid for the 
first time occur. Here is disintegration and effervescence, such as no merely 
mechanical law can explain. And why? Because a new force of a higher sort 
has begun to act, namely, a chemical force. This accomplishes what gravita- 
tion and cohesion never could. It counteracts these tendencies to knit 
together, while it transcends them. But no one will maintain that the laws 
of gravitation and cohesion are annihilated or suspended or violated in the 
least degree. They are still active and operative, and influence to a consid- 
erable extent the disposition of the material particles under the action of 
the higher force. And yet, to the merely mechanical creation, this same 
reaction of carbonate of lime and sulphuric acid is a chemical miracle. 

Again, imagine a world where as yet no forces or laws exist except the 
mechanical and chemical. In such a. world let a seed-corn be planted and 
begin to grow. Here is a new force that abstracts from the soil and bears 
aloft to every portion of the organism the moisture and nutriment suited to 
its needs. Mechanical laws, such as gravitation aud cohesion, may say nay ; 
but they are obliged to yield, and even to help the growing structure aud 
make it strong. Here is a new force that conquers chemistry also, and 
presses it into service ; for every leaf performs the wonderful feat which man 
accomplishes only with long art and imposing mechanism — the feat of decom- 
posing carbonic acid, taking the carbon for food and throwing the oxygen 
away — yet performs it so quietly that the leaf is not even stirred by the 
process. To the merely mechanical and chemical creation this vegetable 
transformation is a vital miracle. The new force does what gravitation and 
chemistry never could, to the end of time. But is any mechanical or chem- 
ical law annihilated, suspended, or violated? By no means. Both sorts of 
law are operative all the time. Partly because they are operative, does the 
plant preserve its balance, maintain its strength, secure its proper sustenance. 

These are instances drawn from nature only. But we know equally well 
that an event in nature may be caused by an agent outside of and above 
nature. The human will can act upon nature and can produce results which 
nature left to herself never could accomplish, while yet no law of nature is 
suspended or violated. To put this in a clear light, let me remind you of 
the German philosopher Fichte's illustration of the uuchangeableness of 
natural sequences. He bids us imagine a pebble swept on to a high place 
upuu the beach, by the strongest wave of a stormy day, and then speculates 



MIRACLES AS ATTESTING REVELATION. 135 

upon the changes iu nature which would have heen requisite to land the 
pebble one foot further upon the sand. The wave must have been of greater 
volume, the wind that drove it of greater force. The preceding state of the 
atmosphere by which the wind was occasioned, and its degree of strength 
determined, must have been different from what it actually was, and the 
previous changes which gave rise to this particular weather must have been 
different also. We must suppose a different temperature from that which 
actually existed, and a different constitution of the bodies which influenced 
that temperature, not only in distant Africa where the wind took its rise, but 
in every other country of the globe. In short, the philosopher must sup- 
pose a different make-up of the whole system of things from the beginning, 
in order that a single pebble might lie in a different place. So he argues 
the impossibility of any modification in the existing condition of material 
agents, unless through the invariable operation of a series of eternally 
impressed consequences following in some necessary chain of orderly con- 
nection. 

But Mansel suggests the answer to Fichte. The answer is as follows: 
Let us make one alteration in the circumstances supposed. Let us imagine 
that, after the winds and waves have done their utmost, I go down to the 
beach, and, lifting the pebble from its place, I deposit it a foot further up 
upon the sand. Is the student of physical science prepared to enumerate a 
similar chain of material antecedents which must have been other than they 
were, before I could have chosen to deposit the pebble on any other spot 
than that on which it is now lying? In other words, is human thought and 
will determined in its sequences and conclusions by natural laws? No one 
except the fatalist will say this. We know, on the contrary, that while 
nature's laws are rigid, there is a power superior to these laws, and exempt 
from their control, namely, the power of the personal will, and that in the 
will of man we have an instance of an efficient cause in the highest sense of 
that term, acting among and along with the physical causes of the material 
world, and producing results which would not have been brought about by 
any invariable sequence of physical causes left to their own action. We 
have evidence, in fine, of an elasticity in the constitution of nature, which 
permits the influence of human power on the phenomena of the world to be 
exercised or suspended at will, without affecting in the least the stability of 
the great system of things. If I throw a stone into the air, its fall is deter- 
mined by natural laws, but can any man say that my throicing it was the 
mere result of natural laws? Nay, my free will — something above nature — 
has done it, nor has any law of nature been violated thereby. 

An additional illustration will enable us to apply this principle to the sub- 
ject in hand. Suppose I stand by the side of a swiftly running stream and 
hold a heavy piece of iron upon my flat, extended palm, in such a way that 
my hand is submerged and the top of the iron is just visible above the sur- 
face of the water. Why does not the iron sink? Because my hand is under- 
neath it. Is the law of gravitation suspended? No, nothing but the axe is 
suspended. How do I know that gravitation still operates? Because the 
axe has weight. I hold it steadily in its place only by effort. If gravitation 
were not acting, the axe would be swept away like a straw by the rapid cur- 
rent. I have counteracted the working of gravitation ; I have pressed it 



136 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. OR, 

into my service, and compelled it to do what left to itself it never would, 
namely, keep a piece of iron immovable at the surface of the wate*; I have 
transcended the powers of natural law by bringing in a new force, namely, 
the force of my own personal will. From the point of view of mere physical 
nature, here is a miracle of will. Yet no law of nature is annihilated, sus- 
pended, or violated. And now, if man can do as much as this, cannot God 
do the same, and, by putting his hand beneath the iron, make the axe to 
swim at the prophet's word? 

But it is urged that the analogy is far from complete, for the reason that 
man's body at least is a part of nature, and that here is a use of means. The 
hand is put underneath the axe. But God has no hands. We reply that 
before man puts his hand under the axe, he must move his hand. And in 
moving his hand, his will comes directly in contact with his own physical 
organism. We do not know hove spirit operates upon matter, but we do 
know that in the human body this operation is a fact. Every time I lift my 
arm, I know that I rule matter and compel it to serve me. I do this freely, 
and no law is violated or suspended therein. With this constant proof before 
me, that spirit can act directly upon matter, I must surely believe that the 
Spirit that is everywhere present can act directly upon matter. And this we 
can maintain without holding that God is confined to the universe, and finds 
in it his sensorium ; that he is in nature does not prove that he is not also 
above nature. What the human will, considered as a supernatural force, and 
what the chemical and vital forces of nature itself, are demonstrably able to 
accomplish, cannot be regarded as beyond the power of God. so long as God 
dwells in and controls the universe. In other words, if a God be possible, 
then miracles are possible. The same God who created the second causes that 
exist in nature, can supplement their action when it pleases him. It is no 
more impossible for him to multiply the five loaves so that they feed five 
thousand, than to multiply the handful of wheat in the earth so that it pro- 
duces the harvest. He who provides remedial agents for the diseases of the 
body, can dispense with these agents, and can heal diseases by his word. H»- 
who gives life at the beginning, caa <ay ; •Lazarus, come forth!" 
more directly in contact with nature than is the human will with its physical 
organism, he can produce new results in nature. The impossibility of the 
miracle can be maintained only upon principles either of Atheism or of 
Pantheism — either upon the ground that there is no God, or that there is no 
God except the God that is immanent in nature, a God without consciousness, 
freedom, or holiness, a God identical with the universe itself. 

A second question was proposed, this namely ; Does the miracle, so far a< 
it is a merely physical fact, necessarily involve an immediate volition of God 
at the time of its occurrence? It has been intimated that there are certain 
of the extraordinary events of Scripture which seem capable of explanation 
without this hypothesis. The wonders of the Red Sea. of the deluge, of 
Sennacherib's destruction, were such. If these were miracles, the immediate 
act of God may hare been simply the communication to the prophet of such 
knowledge of the event, that he was enabled to foretell or command in virtue 
of that communication. Archbishop Trench has proposed to set such 
instances as these by themselves and call them "providential miracles," thus 
intimating that the wonder of them consisted, not in immediate intervention 



MIRACLES AS ATTESTING REVELATION. 137 

or change in the order of nature, but in the providential arrangement of the 
event and of the prophecy, so that they coincided with one another, and 
together gave evidence of the divine commission of the prophet who fore- 
told or commanded them. The outward event may be part of a chain of 
physical antecedents and consequents, the remarkable and exceptional result 
of merely natural causes, yet in its connection with the prophetic word it 
may be a visible token from God. Let us again remind ourselves of the 
definition of a miracle. A miracle is not simply an extraordinary physical 
event, but an extraordinary physical event in peculiar connection with the 
word of a religious teacher or leader. Even if we should grant, therefore, 
that no divine volition goes to the production of the physical event except 
what goes to the production of any other event in nature, still we need 
not deny the direct agency of God in the prophetic announcement with 
which this event was accompanied. The immediate volition would simply 
be relegated to the mental and spiritual world and find its sphere of working 
there. Even if all miracles should be explained in this way, we should not 
lose the evidence of the divine presence and working in the miracle as a 
whole. The prophet's knowledge would prove God to be with him, and 
would completely substantiate his claims. 

This theory of the miracle was broached by Babbage, in his celebrated 
Bridgewater Treatise. Babbage, it will be remembered, was the inventor 
of the great calculating machine to whose construction Parliament made so 
large appropriations. In his treatise, he illustrates his view of the miracle 
by the working of his arithmetical engine. It was so constructed that upon 
setting it in motion, the regular series of whole numbers presented them- 
selves at an aperture in the front of the machine, — one, two, three, four, 
and so on to ten, eleven, twelve, each successive number consisting of the 
last preceding with the addition of a single unit, till the hundreds, thous- 
ands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions were reached. — 
After observing this uniform sequence for days and weeks together, the 
spectator might not unnaturally conclude that succession by regular addi- 
tions of one was the law of the machine. But lo ! after the number ten 
million is reached, there is a sudden leap. We have not ten million and 
one, but 100,000,000, and thereafter the machine reverts to its former law 
of succession. Suppose now that the maker declares the provision for this 
sudden leap to have been made in the original construction of the machine 
— suppose him to foretell the change just before its occurrence, Do you 
esteem his skill greater, or less, than you would esteem it, if he should 
directly cause the change by touching a secret spring before your eyes? 
Evidently the proof of skill would be the greater, the more clearly it could 
be shown that the final result was all provided for in the original making. 
So, says Mr. Babbage, the universe may be a vast machine. It may be 
constructed in such a way that the general law of it shall be uniform phe- 
nomena, but with special provision for isolated events which this general 
law is insuflieient to explain. The regular sequences of nature are the suc- 
cessive appearances of the integral numbers. Miracles are the sudden leaps 
from ten millions to a hundred millions. But both the regular sequences 
and the sudden leaps were all ordained at the beginning, the only differ- 
ence between them being that the former occur according to known law, 



138 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES, OR, 

while the latter reveal a law unknown except to the Contriver of th* 
system. 

Now, to such a view of miracles as this, we would not oppose a direct and 
universal negative. Certain of the Scripture miracles may be harmonized 
with this view. That miracles are called "wonders," "signs," "works," 
"powers," "new things," "wrought by the finger of God," does not dis- 
prove the theory, for God is said to work all things. "My Father worketh 
hitherto and I work," said Christ, though here he spoke of his perpetual 
upholding of nature and government of history. The miracles might be 
"works of God" par excellence, simply because they waken in men's minds 
more distinctly the thought of the divine Being who is always present and 
always active whether men recognize him or not. Miracles on this view 
would be "unusual, while natural law is habitual, divine action. The natural 
Is itself only a prolonged, and so unnoticed, supernatural." We could readily 
grant that that man was a believer in miracles who held this theory, provided 
he also held to a supernatural communication from God as coincident with 
it. Perhaps we cannot even demonstrate that this conception of the miracle 
is incorrect. At the same time we prefer the view which holds to immediate 
divine operation in the realm of nature as well as in the realm of mind, and 
that because of its greater fitness to accomplish the object aimed at in the 
miracle. That object is the giving of a sign. What is needed is the most 
indubitable proof of the divine intent to attest the commission of the person 
in connection with whose prediction or command the work is wrought. It 
is probable that the miracle, if wrought at all, will be so wrought as to 
secure its own signality. But upon the view here considered, this signality 
does not seem to be perfectly secured. For it would always be possible for 
the objector to assert that the so-called prophet had by merely human skill 
penetrated into the secrets of nature and discovered the law of the machine. 
There have been navigators who have used their knowledge of an approach- 
ing eclipse to convince a savage chief that they possessed superhuman powers 
and were entitled to divine homage, and threats backed up by an immediate 
darkening of the sun have proved very effectual. In the middle ages the 
telephone could have been used with great success to simulate a voice from 
heaven. Now, apart from the accompanying purity of life and doctrine 
which must distinguish the genuine miracle, we should naturally expect that 
there would also be such a method of bringing about the outward phenom- 
enon, that there would be least chance of ascribing the knowledge of it to 
mere natural or scientific foresight. As Dr. Newman has said: "It is 
antecedently improbable that the Almighty should rest the credit of bis 
revelation upon events which but obscurely implied his immediate presence." 
Still another illustration of this view is given by Ephraiin Peabody. and 
the mention of it may enable us to fix attention more clearly upon still 
another defect inherent in this method of explaining the miracle. "A story 
is told of a clock on one of the high cathedral towers of the older world, so 
constructed that at the close of a century it strikes the years as it ordinarily 
strikes the hours. As a hundred years come to a close, suddenly, in the 
immense mass of complicated mechanism, a little wheel turns, a pin slides 
into the appointed place, and in the shadows of the night the bell tolls a 
requiem over the generations which during a century have lived and labored 



MIRACLES AS ATTESTING REVELATION. 139 

and then buried around it. One of these generations might live and die 
and witness nothing peculiar. The clock would have what we call an estab- 
lished order of its own ; but what should we say, when, at the midnight 
which brought the century to a close, it sounded over the sleeping city, 
rousing all to listen to the world's age? Would it be a violation of law? 
No, only a variation of the accustomed order, produced by the intervention 
of a force always existing but never appearing in this way until the appointed 
moment had arrived. The tolling of the century would be a variation from 
the observed order of the clock ; but. to the artist in constructing it, it would 
have formed a part of that order. So a miracle is a variation of the order 
of nature as it has appeared to us ; but, to the Author of nature, it was a 
part of that predestined order — a part of that order of which he is at all 
times the immediate author and sustainer ; miraculous to us, seen from our 
human point of view, but no miracle to God ; to our circumscribed vision a 
violation of law, but to God only a part in the great plan and progress of 
the law of the universe." 

Nnw it is evident that here, as in the illustration from the calculating 
engine, there is a law of recurrence. What happens with the clock at the 
end of one century will happen at the end of another. What happens at the 
ten million and first turn of the machine will happen again with the next 
series of similar turns. In the matter of miracles, however, such recurrence 
is wholly unproved. No one miracle is like another ; they do not occur at 
regular intervals ; both in quality and in quantity they bear all the marks 
of proceeding from spontaneity and freedom. If, therefore, we are to look 
to some unknown law of nature as the immediate physical cause and expla- 
nation of them, it must be a law which has in each case only one application. 
The theory would then assert only this, that God has provided in the construc- 
tion of the universe for isolated and exceptional events along the course of 
history, — isolated and exceptional events which have for their office the 
confirmation of the claims of teachers sent by him, — isolated and exceptional 
events which cannot be brought under the law of the general order, nor 
under any law of special order among themselves. It is evidently a misuse 
of the term law, to speak of it as embracing such events as these, for law 
respects classes of phenomena, not isolated facts. Or if we strain the term 
law to embrace them, what does it mean more than simple command, the 
ordaining of an individual result? And how can this be distinguished from 
the direct volition of God except in the one respect, that his volition in the 
former case is executed by the use of means, whereas in the latter he simply 
speaks and it is done? But those with whom we argue are the last to claim 
that even the ordinary operations of nature are carried on without God. 
The world, while it has a separate existence and a measure of independence, 
is yet upheld by God's mighty will, so that nothing comes to pass in which 
he is not active as preserver and raaintainer. He who imposed upon the 
universe the law of miracles must himself supervise its execution. Does 
such a law as this — a law which cannot execute itself — differ so essentially 
from divine volition, to make it worth while to quarrel about the name? 
And since we have evidence of the divine will in miracles, but no evidence, 
in the vast majority of cases, that natural means are employed in the work- 
ing of them, is it not best to define them from the known rather than from 



140 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES, OR, 

the unknown? We know that they are the result of divine volitions; In 
most cases we have no knowledge of intermediate agencies used in producing 
them. It seems most accordant with our knowledge, therefore, to regard 
the miracle, even apart from its coincidence with the word of a religious 
teacher, as an event in nature which, though not contravening any natural 
law, the laws of nature, even if they were fully known to us, would not be 
competent to explain. 

That miracles are possible, however, does not prove them to be probable. 
To this question of the probability of miracles, let us now address ourselves. 
And here we find too frequently, among apologetical writers, a prior assump- 
tion that miracles are as probable as other and ordinary events. The attitude 
of these same apologists towards so-called modern miracles sufficiently shows 
that this assumption very imperfectly represents the facts. We are com- 
pelled to grant and we as frankly acknowledge that, so long as we confine 
our attention to nature, there is a presumption against miracles. The 
experience of each of us testifies that, so far as our observation has gone, the 
operation of natural law has been uniform. We perceive the advantages of 
this uniformity. A general uniformity is necessary in order to make possible 
a rational calculation of the future and a proper ordering of human life. 
But while we acknowledge this, we deny that this uniformity is absolute 
and universal. It is certainly not a truth of reason, that can have no excep- 
tions, like the axiom that the whole is greater than any one of its parts. 
Perhaps the most striking instance of belief in the uniformity of nature is 
that which leads mankind to expect the rising of to-morrow morning's sun. 
But no one can examine this belief without being convinced that there is no 
necessity about it like the necessity that two and two should make four. At- 
tempt to conceive of two and two making five, and you violate a first princi- 
ple of reason. But there is no self-contradiction in the thought that to-mor- 
row should see no sunrise. Experience of the past is not experience of the 
future. Experience of the past gives no absolute certainty of the future. 
"Like the stern lights of a ship," as Coleridge says, "it illuminates only the 
track over which it has passed." Hence experience cannot warrant belief 
in absolute and universal uniformity, except upon the absurd hypothesis that 
experience is identical with absolute and universal knowledge. Nor is it of 
any avail to point to the principal of induction — as if this bridged the gulf 
and converted the probable into the necessary; for induction of observed 
instances warrants only an expectation of the future — it never can prove 
that future to exist or to be of any definite character. Says Mr. Huxley: — 
"It is very convenient to indicate that all the conditions of belief have been 
fulfilled in this case of gravitation, by calling the statement that unsupported 
stones will fall to the ground a law of nature. But when, as commonly 
happens, we change 'will' into 'must,' we introduce an idea of necessity 
which has no warrant in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can 
discover elsewhere. For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematize the 
intruder. Fact I know, and law I know ; but what is this necessity, but an 
empty shadow of the mind's own throwing?" 

Any proper account of the inductive process must regard it as presup- 
posing the uniformity of nature. But this uniformity of nature is not itself 
an ultimate truth — there is a greater truth back of that, namely, universal 



MIRACLES AS ATTESTING REVELATION. 141 

design. From one or more observed instances I can argue to those which 
have not been observed, only upon the assumption that the universe has 
been rationally constructed, so that its various parts correspond to one 
another and to the investigating faculties of man. But this is virtually to 
say that the principle of final cause underlies the principle of efficient cause, 
and that this latter must find its limit in the former. In the words of Dr. 
Porter: "If efficient causes and physical laws must acknowledge themselves 
Indebted to final causes in order to command our confidence, then they must 
also confess their subjection to the same and be ready to stand aside and be 
suspended whenever the principle of final cause shall require. In other 
words, the order of nature may be broken whenever the principle of final 
cause shall require ; that is, whenever the claims of the so-called reason of 
things, or of alleged moral and religious interests, may demand an inroad 
upon its regularity either in special acts of creation or in exertions of mirac- 
ulous agency." " Th» principle of final cause will not only render the 
service of sustaining our confidence in the stability of the laws of nature 
under all ordinary circumstances, but will also account for such extraordinary 
deviations from this order as may be required in the history of man." The 
qualifications to be made in the phraseology of Dr. Porter, as to suspension 
of law, will readily occur to us, after what has previously been said. The 
substantial truth remains intact that, since we cannot conduct the process of 
scientific induction at all without assuming that a principle of design per- 
vades the universe and constitutes it a rational whole, the uniformity which 
we see about us is a uniformity which has its limitations in this very princi- 
ple of design, and may be expected to give way when there exists a sufficient 
reason therefor in the mind of him who made it. If induction itself is 
founded upon design, then design is greater than induction, and may embrace 
facts for which mere Induction can never account. 

Not only is it not true that the uniformity of nature is a truth of reason, 
which admits of no exceptions, but it is true that science herself reveals the 
existence of breaks in this uniformity. The limited explorations of European 
geologists have given rise to the uniformitarian theory of the earth's progress. 
But the later investigations of Clarence King, Superintendent of the United 
States Survey of the Forty-ninth Parallel, conducted over an extent of terri- 
tory such as British scientists have never traversed, have apparently demon- 
strated that cataclysms occurred in the past history of the planet so vast and 
eo tremendous in their influence upon the various forms of life that only 
the most plastic of these forms survived. The edict went forth to every 
living creature : ' Change or die ! ' So the geological leaps were accom- 
panied with biological leaps so great as to be equivalent to new creations. 
But not only in the changes from one organic form to another do we see 
evidence adverse to the theory of perpetually uniform sequences in nature. 
The introductions successively of vegetable life, of animal life, of human 
life, and finally of the life of Jesus Christ, are utterly inexplicable from 
their respective antecedents. Science knows absolutely nothing of spon- 
taneous generation, absolutely nothing of the evolution of the organic from 
the inorganic, or of man's intellectual and moral powers from those of the 
brute. The new beginnings I have mentioned cannot be rationally ac- 
counted for except by the coming down upon nature of a power above 



142 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES, OR, 

nature, in other words, by new creations in the absolute sense. When 
science can produce bacteria from ammonia and water, change any lower 
creature into a responsible being, construct a Christ out of a man consciously 
guilty, then and only then can she afford to speak slightingly of miracles. 

The testimony of nature, then, is simply this : Although there is a presump- 
tion against miracles, there is nothing in experience or in the primitive 
ideas of the mind which renders investigation of their claims unnecessary. 
But there is another world than that of nature. The physical is supple- 
mented by the moral, and finds in the moral its explanation and end. It is 
unscientific to conclude that miracles are improbable, simply upon the testi- 
mony of the physical universe; for the reason that the physical universe is 
but the half, and the lower half, of the great system. What is improbable 
when judged from the point of view of mere physics, may be eminently 
probable when judged from the point of view of morals. If then we can 
show that even the physical universe has relations to the moral, and is made 
to serve it, we do much to compel a transfer of the controversy from the 
physical, to the moral, realm. And this we maintain. There is a moral law 
inlaid in nature. We could conceive a system in which the violation of 
moral obligation might be accompanied with the highest physical well being. 
Pride and even licentiousness might be the path to health. But the present 
order of the world is different. As the universe is at present constructed, 
honesty is the best policy. Sin is its own detecter and judge and tormentor. 
In the very framework of matter and of mind is inwrought the tendency to 
punish vice and reward virtue. The universe does not exist for itself alone 
— a great dumb show from age to age. The mere circling of world about 
world, growth and decay, life and death — these are not all. The universe 
has an end beyond and above itself. It is for moral ends and moral beings. 
So much is made plain to us by the inworking of the moral law into the con- 
stitution and course of nature. And if the universe is made to subserve 
moral ends, if it exists for the contemplation and use of moral beings, if it 
is constructed for the purpose of revealing to them God's law, and the God 
who is the source of law, then it is probable that the God of nature will pro- 
duce effects aside from those of natural law, whenever there are sufficiently 
important ends to be served thereby. In short, if the moral ends for which 
the universe exists are not attained by the operation of natural law alone, 
it is probable that these ends will be attained by methods beyond and above 
those of natural law. All that is needed to render miracles probable is a 
'digitus vindice nodus/ — an exigency worthy of the interposition. 

Is there such an exigency? We claim that the moral disorder of the 
world is such an exigency. This moral disorder is not a part of the original 
creation, nor is it the work of God. If it were, we should not hope for rec- 
tification. But it is man's work, and results from the free acts of man's will. 
To deny that man may mar the Creator's handiwork, is to deny conscious- 
ness and conscience. These testify to man's freedom and sole responsibility 
for moral evil; these testify that God is the hater and punisher of it. If 
now, through no fault of the maker, the watch has been suffered to get out 
of order so that it no longer fulfils its end of keeping time, shall any fancied 
sacredness about its mechanism prevent the rectification of that disorder, 
and the touch of the regulator by the maker's hand? In the original design 



MIRACLES AS ATTESTING REVELATION. 143 

of the watch, the winding up and setting of the regulator were provided for. 
Subsequent repair and readjustment are but the carrying out of the ultimate 
purpose of the mechanism, that it should correctly mark the houi's. And 
when the moral world, through no fault of its Author, has ceased to fulfil its 
end of representing and reflecting the divine holiness, shall it be thought 
improbable that God should make bare the arm which the garment of nature 
had hid, and make known his power by setting at work new principles of holi- 
ness and life? When the lower world has become so sundered from the 
higher as to forget its true meaning and end, is it strange that the higher 
should touch the lower, and that changes in this lower should result? We 
claim, therefore, that the existence of moral disorder consequent upon the 
free acts of man's will changes the presumption against miracles into a pre- 
sumption in their favor, so that, in a true sense, the non-appearance of mir- 
acles would be the greatest of miracles. 

Our judgment with regard to the probability of miracles will depend in 
great part upon the extent to which we perceive this moral disorder in the 
world and in our own breasts. The degree to which we perceive this will 
depend, in turn, upon the conception we cherish with regard to God. As Dr. 
Mozley has intimated, there are two ruling ideas of God. The one gathers 
round conscience, the other round a physical centre. The one looks upon 
God as the supreme mundane Intelligence, penetrating and pervading the 
physical universe, and manifested in all the tides of the world's life and civ- 
ilization. The other regards him as the high and holy One — the God of 
infinite moral purity, whose voice conscience echoes, and who is the Gover- 
nor and Judge of all human souls. If we take the former view exclusively 
or even predominantly, the regular order of nature's successions will seem a 
full and sufficient revelation of the Almighty, and then there is no place for 
miracles — they are an impertinence and a contradiction. But if we take the 
latter view, then the contrast between the spotless purity of God and the uui- 
rersal sin of the world will unspeakably affect us ; the whole course of nature 
will seem out of joint, the end of creation unattained, and all things in heaven 
and earth, man's nature and God's nature as well, will seem to cry out for 
the world's deliverance and redemption. On this view, miracles have a place, 
and a fit place, in the whole scheme of things ; they are antecedently prob- 
able. And therefore the denial of miracles on the part of those who hold 
the former view of God ought not to perplex us, or to shake our faith. They 
deny miracles, because they have not the whole evidence before them. The 
moral argument in favor of miracles has no force to them, because they have 
no eye for the facts on which it is based. But their not seeing them does 
annihilate them. The moral wants of the world, once apprehended, render 
miracles probable, as the accompaniments and attestations of a divine 
revelation. 

Miracles are probable ; but whether they have actually taken place is a 
question of evidence. What amount of testimony is necessary to prove a 
miracle ? We reply : No more than is requisite to prove the occurrence of 
any other unusual, but confessedly possible, event. Hume indeed argued 
that a miracle is so contradictory of all human experience that it is more 
reasonable to believe any amount of testimony false than to believe a 
miracle to be true. But the argument is fallacious. It is chargeable with 




THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. OR, 

is contrary to all hamu i 
H:r_r EM mean :r."..- - :r 
miracle. Bat others say that 
he measure of all 
rience, wonld make the proof of any absolutely new fact impossible, 
the evidence of oar own senses would be insufficient to prove a miracle; 
for what is contrary to our past experience would be incredible. Even 
if God should work a miracle, he could, on this view, never prove it. What 
is this general experience of mankind, that is held to render the mir- 
acle incredible? It is merely negative experience. When one man test ifi e s 
that he witnessed the commission of a certain crime, shall it be sufficient is 
r eb u t ta l to bring a hundred men who were not present and who declare that 
they never saw any such tiling? Negative testimony can never neutralize 
that which is positive, except upon principles which would invalidate all tes- 
timony whatsoever. And how do we know what general experience is? 
Why, only from testimony. Yet Hume commits the self-contradiction of 
seeking to overthrow our faith in human testimony, by adducing to the con- 
trary the general experience of men of which we raov only through 
mony. Moreover, Hume's view requires belief in a greater wonder than 
those which it would escape. That multitudes of intelligent and h o n est men 
should, against all their interests, unite in deliberate and persistent false- 
i::i i-It: :_e :ir. :~-:i:..r5 :.:::.. in ::; N_- 7~ i —rz~ r- r '. in- 
volves a change in the sequences of the mental and spiritual world far 
~:rc ic:rTi:':"-r -'zzz i:-:- :_; ~i:_ i^? ::' •:_:>: -- I Li? 2:-:?:".r5. 

What have we now proved, and where does the argume nt thus far leave 
us? In our judgment, we have proved that, granting the fact of a revela- 
tion, miracles are necessary to attest it; that there is nothing to the relation 
of miracles to natural law to render them impossible; that there is nothing 
to the relation of miracles to the laws of evidence to render them improbable. 
They can be subjects of testimony, like other facts. Provided the facts are 
certified by witnesses who in other matters are recognised as competent and 
credible, there is no more rational warrant for rejecting miracles than for 
rejecting accounts of eclipses and of darkenings of the sun. 

But because miracles are possible and probable, it does not follow that we 
--?: i: . r. : i? ~:: :'.- i.l -._:.: : :~ ? :: •;? ;zi;r :_ .: -_i~- ~ e :: - -; "..- 
:-ir- :: ::i\?:: : — .-_ :: rrr;>: — r-?. :z ; :_ : ;; ::' :_r i: : -.rer.:"..- -in:- 
ulous that presents itself, and to decide it upon its own merits. Now we do 
not propose to take np the New Testament miracles singly and in detail- 
It win be sufficient to point out the proper course to be pur sued in further 
investigation of the subject. That course, we are persuaded, is to take first 
of all that great central miracle upon which Christianity rests her claims and 
to which the church looks back as to the source of her life — I mean the 
miracle of Christ's resurrection. To that miracle we have as witnesses two 
of the evangelists and the Apostle Paul, each of whom personally saw Jesus 
after he had risen from the dead, and these witnesses represent the faith of 
a great body of early believers for whom they speak. " Like banners of a 
hidden army, or peaks of a distant mountain range, they represent and are 
sustained by compact and continuous bodies below." The accounts of 
these witnesses would have been contradicted if contradiction had been 



MIRACLES AS ATTESTING REVELATION. 145 

possible. That multitudes believed their story, and against all their vorldly 
interests became disciples of Christ, is proof that they believed it to be true. 
The existence of the church, the existence of Christianity itself, with its 
doctrines and its ordinances, is inexplicable except upon the hypothesis that 
what these witnesses believed, was true. The supposition of dream or 
delusion, of myth or romance, of apparition or imagination, is utterly incom- 
petent to solve the problem how keen-witted and brave-hearted and truth- 
loving men became converts to a faith they had bitterly opposed, and went 
to imprisonment and martyrdom in its defense. It is irrational to suppose 
that this mighty fabric of Christian faith and life which has so blessed the 
world has its foundation either in fraud or in self-deception. But the resur- 
rection of Jesus Christ, once granted, carries with it directly or indirectly 
all the other miracles of the New Testament. That one miracle proves Jesus 
Christ to be a teacher sent from God; proves his words to be a revelation 
from God to men ; proves his asserted oneness with God and equality with 
God to be a fact. The coming of sueh a Being into history is the most 
wonderful of all events. From this point of view, the miracles of his life 
assume a new aspect. They are fit manifestations of the incarnate Deity, 
fit accompaniments of the miracles of his coming and his resurrection. But 
more than this, the miracles of the New Testament carry with them the 
miracles of the Old. These are the fitting preludes and preparations for the 
coming of God into the world which he created, — fitting signs and prophe- 
cies to make the world ready for the great event. And so, as a matter of 
fact, the great epochs of miracles are coincident with the great epochs of 
revelation. About Moses, the giver of the law, about the prophets as inter- 
preters of the law, there are congeries of miracles. We find them just 
where we should expect them, the natural accompaniments and attestations 
of those new communications from God which at successive periods prepared 
the way for the coming of his Son. And this shows us why they have 
ceased. They were candles before the dawn — put out after the sun has 
risen ; serving to draw attention to new truth, they naturally pass away 
when the truth has gained currency and foothold. Clustering around the 
person of the divine Redeemer and ceasing when his kingdom has been 
founded, they are to occur again only when he comes the second time in the 
clouds of heaven to usher in the final consummation. 

Thus we regard the resurrection of Christ as the central proof of Chris- 
tianity. For this reason it was a main subject of apostolic preaching and a 
main teaching of the ordinances. It remains to-day just what it then was. 
We challenge the world to dispute the fact of Christ's resurrection, and the 
fact being conceded, we challenge the world to show cause why it should not 
accept Christ and Christianity. This one fact of Christ's resurrection 
admitted, and the battle is substantially won. With regard to particular 
instances of miracle in the Old Testament or the New, there may be ques- 
tions which we cannot answer and difficulties which we cannot solve. 
Christianity does not stand or fall with any single one of these, so long as 
the resurrection of Christ is held to be matter of history. We may not be 
able to mark the precise time when miracles ceased. There is reason to 
believe that they ceased with the first century, or at any rate with the pass- 
ing away of those upon whom the apostles had laid their hands. So long as 
10 



14U THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES, OR, 

the Scripture canon was incomplete, there was need of miracles. When 
documentary evidence was at hand, miracles were .seen no longer. The 
fathers of the second century speak of miracles, but they confess that they 
are of a class widely different from the wonders wrought in the days of the 
apostles. And so of mediaeval and modern miracles. The Scripture recog- 
nizes the existence of counterfeit miracles and denominates them 'lying 
wonders.' These counterfeit miracles, in various ages, argue that the belief 
in miracles is natural to the race and that somewhere there must exist the 
true. They serve to show that not all supernatural occurrences are of divine 
origin, and to impress upon us the necessity of careful examination before 
we give them credence. False miracles may commonly be distinguished 
from the true, by their accompaniments of immoral conduct or of doctrine 
contradictory to truth already revealed, as in modern spiritualism; by their 
internal characteristics of insanity or extravagance, as in the liquefaction 
of the blood of St. Januarius, or in the miracles of the Apocryphal New 
Testament ; in the insufficiency of the object which they are designed to 
further, as in the case nf Apollonius of Tyana, or of the miracles said to 
accompany the publication <>f the doctrine of the immaculate conception; 
or finally, in their lack of substantiating evidence, as in mediaeval miracles, 
which are seldom if ever attested by contemporary and disinterested 
witnesses. 

A simple comparison of other so-called miracles with those of Scripture 
suffices to show the vast superiority of the latter in sobriety, in benevolence, 
in purpose, in evidence. Mahomet disclaimed all power to work miracles, 
and appealed to the Koran in lieu of them, so that its paragraphs are called 
aidtj or 'sign.' But later legends relate that Mahomet caused darkness at 
noon, whereupon the moon flew to him, and after going seven times round 
the Kaaba, bowed to him, then entered his right sleeve, and, slipping out at 
the left, split into two halves, which after severally retiring to the extreme 
east and west, were once more united to each other. These were truly signs 
from heaven, but they make no impression upon us. The fable of St. Alban, 
the first martyr of Britain, illustrates to us the nature of mediaeval miracles. 
The saint walks about, after his head is cut off, and. that he -may not be 
wholly deprived of that useful portion of his body, he carries it in his hand. 
Mediaeval miracles were part of a complicated system of deceit and evil, 
constructed to further the secular interests of a domineering church. Ante- 
cedently improbable, from their connection with the organization of which 
they are the representatives, they fail to pass either of the tests which dis- 
tinguish the true miracle from the false. But in the New Testament all 
these tests are met. Here is purity of life in the teachers who work them, 
accompanied by the proclamation of doctrine not only consistent with God's 
past teachings, but constituting the keystone of the arch of revelation ; here 
are sobriety and grandeur, benevolence and wisdom, united in every act; 
here are objects worthy of divine intervention, the attesting of the divine 
commission of his Son and the certification that what he teaches is God's 
authoritative word of life and salvation ; here is evidence of the occurrence 
of these miracles from eye-witnesses of keen discernment and irreproachable 
integrity, who had no conceivable motive for dishonesty, and who imperiled 
their lives by the testimony they gave — witnesses who mutually support 



MIRACLES AS ATTESTING REVELATION. 147 

each other without the possibility of collusion, and whose testimony perfectly 
agrees with collateral facts and circumstances, so far as these can be ascer- 
tained from the most rigorous investigations into the literature and history 
of their time. No other religion professes to be attested by miracles at all ; 
no other miracles of any age present evidence of their genuineness compar- 
able to these. Indeed, the result of extended investigation is simply this : 
The Christian miracles are the only series of miracles that have the slightest 
claim to rational credence, yet no man can rationally doubt that the 
Christian miracles were wrought by God. 

Here we might leave our theme. We make but one closing remark. The 
belief in many fancied manifestations of the supernatural has vanished with 
the advance of civilization. Sir Matthew Hale and his belief in witches are 
things of the past. But the belief in the Christian miracles has not vanished : 
it has not decreased ; it sways a larger number of minds, and minds of 
higher quality and culture, to-day than ever before. With civilization, the 
belief in other wonders disappears. With civilization, the belief in the 
Christian miracles steadily and irresistibly advances. It is an instance of 
survival of the fittest. It is inexplicable, except by difference of kind between 
the faith and the superstition. And the faith whose progress is never 
retrograde, but whose dominion perpetually widens, unless the laws of mind 
and of history be changed in the interest of unbelief, must some day inevi- 
tably embrace among its adherents the total race of man. 



X. 

THE METHOD OF EJSPIRATIOX/ 



Among sincere believers in the all-pervading inspiration of the Scriptures, 
there are minor differences of opinion. These differences have respect 
chiefly to the method in which the Holy Spirit wrought upon the sacred 
writers. Some are unable to conceive of any inspiration which does not 
involve an external communication and reception. Richard Hooker, the 
great English Churchman of the sixteenth century, asserts that the authors 
of the Bible "neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered 
syllable by syllable as the Spirit put in into their mouths." We may call 
this the dictation -theory of inspiration. There are undoubtedly instances 
in which this method was used by God. When Moses went into the taber- 
nacle, he "heard the voice speaking to him from between the cherubim." 
When John was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, he was bidden to write cer- 
tain definite words to the seven churches. But we conceive that this theory 
rests upon a very partial induction of Scripture facts. It unwarrantably 
assumes that occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable 
method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible. 

There is another far larger class of facts which this theory is wholly un- 
able to explain. There is a manifestly human element in the Scriptures. 
There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each 
writer from those of every other, — witness Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts 
of grief and of enthusiasm. There are variations in accounts of the same 
scene or transaction ; which indicate personal idiosyncrasies in the different 
writers, — witness the descriptions of Mark as compared with those of Mat- 
thew. These facts tend to show that what they wrote was not dictated to 
them, but was in a true sense the product of their own observation and 
thought. They were not simply pens — they were penmen — of the Spirit. 
God's authorship did not preclude a human authorship also. 

It has been sought to break the force of these facts by urging that the 
omniscient and omnipotent Spirit could without difficulty put his com- 
munications into all varieties of human speech. Quenstedt, the Lutheran 
theologian, declared that " the Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with 
those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to 
themselves." We are reminded of Voltaire's idea that God created fossils 
in the rocks, just such as they would have been had ancient seas existed. 
A theory like this virtually accuses God of unveracity. In nature he has 
not made our senses to deceive us. Much less in his word has he led our 
minds astray by filling it with illusory indications of intellectual activity on 
the part of prophets and evangelists. 



Printed in the Examiner, Oct. 7 and Oct. 14, 1SS0. 
148 



THE METHOD OF INSPIRATION. 149 

We must remember, moreover, that large parts of the Scriptures consist 
of narratives of events with which the writers were personally familiar. It 
is Inconsistent with any wise economy of means in the divine administration, 
that the Scripture-writers should have had dictated to them what they knew 
already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural 
powers. That Luke made diligent inquiry as to the facts which he was to 
record, he expressly tells us in the preface to his Gospel. If, after all this 
gathering of materials, Luke still required to have his Gospel dictated to 
him word for word, it is difficult to see the need of the preliminary investi- 
gations. Why employ eye-witnesses of the Saviour's life, like John? Might 
not the Gospel which proceeded from his pen have been equally well written 
by one who never saw the Lord, nay, by one who lived a thousand years 
before his coming? 

It is sometimes said that these considerations, convincing as they may 
seem, can weigh nothing against the plain assertion of Paul that he speaks 
"not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost 
teacheth." A careful examination of this passage, however, will show that 
there is not only no dictation here, but that all such mechanical influence is 
by implication excluded. In what way are we to suppose that "man's wis- 
dom teacheth?" By dictating word for word? Not at all. It is rather by 
so Ailing the writer's mind, that he uses words addressed to the merely 
natural tastes and opinions of men. So the speech "taught by the Spirit," 
or "learned of the Spirit," as we may better translate the phrase, is not the 
utterance of words dictated one by one by the Holy Ghost, but simply the 
expression of the thought with which the Spirit has filled the mind, in words 
of whose adequateness and appropriateness that same Spirit furnishes the 
guarantee. The passage teaches nothing more than that the general manner 
of discourse was ordered by God, so that the writers joined to the matter 
revealed by the Spirit words which they had also learned from the Spirit 
how to employ. In what precise way the Holy Spirit secured a right use 
of words we may or may not be able to determine. It is certain that this 
particular passage does not inform us, — much less does it constitute a direct 
affirmation of the dictation-theory of inspiration. 

By way of transition to what seems to us a more reasonable conception of 
the general method of inspiration, we may add to all the preceding objec- 
tions still one more. The theory of word-for-word dictation contradicts 
what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and 
nobler God's communications are, the more fully is the recipient in posses- 
sion and use of his own faculties. To Joseph's dullness of perception God 
speaks in a vision of his sleep, but to Mary the angel of the annunciation 
delivers his message in her waking hours. We cannot suppose that the 
composition of the Scriptures, that highest work of man under the influence 
of God's Spirit, was purely mechanical. On the contrary, it seems plain to 
us that Psalms and Gospels and Epistles alike bear indubitable marks of 
having proceeded from living human hearts, and from minds in the most 
active and energetic movement. But, in order clearly to present our own 
view of God's method, it will be necessary to say a preliminary word with 
regard to the general matter of divine and human cooperation. 

There are those who conceive of God's working and man's working as 



150 THE METHOD OF INSPIRATION. 

mutually exclusive of each other. They cannot comprehend the possibility 
of an act's having man for its author in the most complete sense, and yet 
being in an equally complete sense the work of God. Yet just such coop- 
eration of God and man is brought to our view in the apostle's injunction : 
•'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God which 
worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure." Even regen- 
eration and conversion are respectively the divine and the human aspects of 
a change in which God and man are equally active, although logically 
speaking the initiative is wholly with God. But the highest and most won- 
derful proof and illustration of such union of divine and human activities is 
found in the person of the God-man, Jesus Christ. There surely the fact 
that a work is human does not prevent its being also divine, nor the fact 
that a work is divine prevent its being also human. 

It is the great service to theology of Dorner, the distinguished German 
writer, that he has reiterated and emphasized this truth that man is not a 
mere tangent to God, capable of juxtaposition and contact with him, but of 
no interpenetration and indwelling of the divine Spirit. Every believer 
knows that the effect of God's union with his soul is only to put him more 
fully in possession of his own powers ; in truth, he never is truly and fully 
himself until God is in him and works through him. Then only he learns how 
much there is of him, and of what lofty things he is capable. Now in this 
truth, as we conceive, lies the key to the doctrine of inspiration. The 
Scriptures are the production equally of God and of man, and are never to 
be regarded as merely human or merely divine. The wonder of inspiration 
— that which constitutes it a unique fact — Is in neither of these terms sep- 
arately, but in the union of the two. Those whom God raised up and 
providentially qualified, spoke and wrote the words of God, not as from 
without but as from within ; and that, not passively, but in the most con- 
scious possession and the most exalted exercise of their own powers of 
intellect, emotion and will. 

Inspiration is a unique fact, and in attempting to illustrate our meaning, 
we run the risk of misleading. But let us run this risk, and trust to subse- 
quent explanation to correct any false inferences from our illustrations. 
What dictation is, we know without any example. The merchant dictates a 
letter by word of mouth, and after it is written reads it over, and if it is 
correct authorizes the sending of it. It is his letter, though not a word of 
it is in his handwriting. This is the first method — a method employed, as 
we grant, in Scripture, though, as we also believe, only in rare and excep- 
tional cases. There is a second method which may conceivably have been 
employed. In an interview with his confidential clerk, the same merchant 
may give the clerk a general idea of the letter which he desires to have 
written, but may leave the words and even the method of treatment in large 
degree to the clerk's discretion. Still it is the merchant's letter, not the 
clerk's. In fact, it would be to all intents and purposes his letter, had he 
given no special directions to his secretary, but had left him to be guided in 
his writing by what he knew of the general spirit and business methods of 
his employer,— that is, it would be the employer's letter, if it were accepted 
by that employer and sent forth by one authorized to act in his name. Now 
it is possible that the Scriptures might be the word of God, even though the 



THE METHOD OF INSPIRATION. 151 

relation between the divine and the human authors should in some eases be 
no more close than this. God might raise up men and providentially pre- 
pare them for this special work ; he might specially call them to it by inward 
impulse or by the outward certification of miracle, and though there should 
be no dictation and no suggestion of anything more than the general idea 
to be expressed, his acceptance of their work and publication of it as his 
own might constitute it as fully his word, as it would be if he had dictated 
every part. 

But let us hasten to say, however, that the method of "general instruc- 
tions" suggested by the illustration just given seems to us equally insuffi- 
cient to account for the facts with the method of dictation previously spoken 
of. The only parts of the Scripture that could with any semblance of 
probability be thought of as composed in this way would be those portions 
which most closely resemble secular literature, such as the books of the 
Chronicles, or certain of the Psalms, or the Acts of the Apostles. But even 
here, the loftiness of tone, the absolute freedom from all proved historical 
error, the incidental inculcation of profound doctrine, the important signifi- 
cance of slight shades of expression, render it impossible, for the Christian 
reader to avoid the conclusion that over the whole process of composition a 
wisdom higher than the wisdom of this world, even the wisdom of the Holy 
Ghost, must have presided. While we reject the dictation-theory of inspir- 
ation as an explanation of the general method in which the Scriptures were 
written, we reject as entirely and unqualifiedly the theory that God simply 
put his ideas into the minds of the sacred writers, and then left them, in 
independence of himself, to the hazardous and stupendous task of furnishing 
the whole method of treatment and the entire means of expression. 

Is there a middle ground between these two extremes? Or rather, is there 
not a higher point of view from which all the truth which is in each of these 
theories may be grasped, while the error is excluded? We believe that 
there is. A third illustration will prepare the way for stating it. There are 
occasional experiences in the ministry of a faithful preacher of Christ's 
gospel, when the word of his Master seems fulfilled: -'It is not ye that 
speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you." After thor- 
ough and prayerful preparation, he appears before a public audience to utter 
God's truth with regard to sin and to salvation. As he proceeds in his 
discourse, the order of thought upon which he had fixed in his study seems 
like a track illumined with the clear light of heaven. All the surroundings 
and suggestions of the hour are lines converging toward his chosen end — 
the impressing of a definite truth upon the minds of his hearers. And that 
truth takes possession of his very soul ; he feels its unutterable greatness. 
its supreme claims; he is dying to utter it — aye, the struggle of his nature 
is so great that he almost dies in the uttering of it — his very life seems to 
go out with his words. Such new powers of thought and feeling are roused 
to action within him, that he wonders at himself ; and as for expression, it 
seems like the full flowing of an irrepressible fountain — words fit themselves 
to thought with an exactness and grace, a persuasiveness and power, of 
which he never deemed himself capable. In short, he becomes possessed 
with the truth, and he proclaims the truth, in a state of insight and exalta- 
tion that puts to shame all his common moods, and gives almost a taste of the 



150 THE METHOD OF INSPIRATION. 

mutually exclusive Of each other. They cannot comprehend the possibility 
of an act's having man for its author in the most complete sense, and yet 
being in an equally complete sense the work of God. Yet just such coop- 
eration of God and man is brought to our view in the apostle's injunction : 
•'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God which 
worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure." Even regen- 
eration and conversion are respectively the divine and the human aspects of 
a change in which God and man are equally active, although logically 
speaking the initiative is wholly with God. But the highest and most won- 
derful proof and illustration of such union of divine and human activities is 
found in the person of the God-man, Jesus Christ. There surely the fact 
that a work is human does not prevent its being also divine, nor the fact 
that a work is divine prevent its being also human. 

It is the great service to theology of Dorner, tbe distinguished German 
writer, that he has reiterated and emphasized this truth that man is not a 
mere tangent to God, capable of juxtaposition and contact with him, but of 
no interpenetration and indwelling of the divine Spirit. Every believer 
knows that the effect of God's union with his soul is only to put him more 
fully in possession of his own powers ; in truth, he never is truly and fully 
himself until God is in him and works through him. Then only he learns how 
much there is of him, and of what lofty things he is capable. Now in this 
truth, as we conceive, lies the key to the doctrine of inspiration. The 
Scriptures are the production equally of God and of man, and are never to 
be regarded as merely human or merely divine. The wonder of inspiration 
— that which constitutes it a unique fact — is in neither of these terms sep- 
arately, but in the union of the two. Those whom God raised up and 
providentially qualified, spoke and wrote the words of God, not as from 
without but as from within ; and that, not passively, but in the most con- 
scious possession and the most exalted exercise of their own powers of 
intellect, emotion and will. 

Inspiration is a unique fact, and in attempting to illustrate our meaning. 
we run the risk of misleading. But let us run this risk, and trust to subse- 
quent explanation to correct any false inferences from our illustrations. 
What dictation is, we know without any example. The merchant dictates a 
letter by word of mouth, and after it is written reads it over, and if it is 
correct authorizes the sending of it. It is his letter, though not a word of 
it is in his handwriting. This is the first method — a method employed, as 
we grant, in Scripture, though, as we also believe, only in rare and excep- 
tional cases. There is a second method which may conceivably have been 
employed. In an interview with his confidential clerk, the same merchant 
may give the clerk a general idea of the letter which he desires to have 
written, but may leave the words and even the method of treatment in large 
degree to the clerk's discretion. Still it is the merchant's letter, not the 
clerk's. In fact, it would be to all intents and purposes his letter, had he 
given no special directions to his secretary, but had left him to be guided in 
his writing by what he knew of the general spirit and business methods of 
his employer,— that is, it would be the employer's letter, if it were accepted 
by that employer and sent forth by one authorized to act in his name. Now 
it is possible that the Scriptures might be the word of God, even though the 



THE METHOD OF INSPIRATION. 151 

relation between the divine and the human authors should in some eases be 
no more close than this. God might raise up men and providentially pre- 
pare them for this special work ; he might specially call them to it by inward 
impulse or by the outward certification of miracle, and though there should 
be no dictation and no suggestion of anything more than the general idea 
to be expressed, his acceptance of their work and publication of it as his 
own might constitute it as fully his word, as it would be if he had dictated 
every part. 

But let us hasten to say, however, that the method of "general instruc- 
tions" suggested by the illustration just given seems to us equally insuffi- 
cient to account for the facts with the method of dictation previously spoken 
of. The only parts of the Scripture that could with any semblance of 
probability be thought of as composed in this way would be those portions 
which most closely resemble secular literature, such as the books of the 
Chronicles, or certain of the Psalms, or the Acts of the Apostles. But even 
here, the loftiness of tone, the absolute freedom from all proved historical 
error, the incidental inculcation of profound doctrine, the important signifi- 
cance of slight shades of expression, render it impossible, for the Christian 
reader to avoid the conclusion that over the whole process of composition a 
wisdom higher than the wisdom of this world, even the wisdom of the Holy 
Ghost, must have presided. While we reject the dictation-theory of inspir- 
ation as an explanation of the general method in which the Scriptures were 
written, we reject as entirely and unqualifiedly the theory that God simply 
put his ideas into the minds of the sacred writers, and then left them, in 
independence of himself, to the hazardous and stupendous task of furnishing 
the whole method of treatment and the entire means of expression. 

Is there a middle ground between these two extremes? Or rather, is there 
not a higher point of view from which all the truth which is in each of these 
theories may be grasped, while the error is excluded? We believe that 
there is. A third illustration will prepare the way for stating it. There are 
occasional experiences in the ministry of a faithful preacher of Christ's 
gospel, when the word of his Master seems fulfilled: ''It is not ye that 
speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you." After thor- 
ough and prayerful preparation, he appears before a public audience to utter 
God's truth with regard to sin and to salvation. As he proceeds in his 
discourse, the order of thought upon which he had fixed in his study seems 
like a track illumined with the clear light of heaven. All the surroundings 
and suggestions of the hour are lines converging toward his chosen end — ■ 
the impressing of a definite truth upon the minds of his hearers. And that 
truth takes possession of his very soul ; he feels its unutterable greatness. 
its supreme claims ; he is dying to utter it — aye, the struggle of his nature 
is so great that he almost dies in the uttering of it — his very life seems to 
go out with his words. Such new powers of thought and feeling are roused 
to action within him, that he wonders at himself; and as for expression, it 
seems like the full flowing of an irrepressible fountain — words fit themselves 
to thought with an exactness and grace, a persuasiveness and power, of 
which he never deemed himself capable. In short, he becomes possessed 
with the truth, and he proclaims the truth, in a state of insight and exalta- 
tion that puts to shame all his common moods, and gives almost a taste of the 



154 THE METHOD OF INSPIRATION. 

This seems to be the meaning of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
when he tells us that in Old Testament times God spoke to the fathers 
through the prophets in many parts and in many ways. Inspiration, there- 
fore, may be best regarded as a bestowment of various kinds and degrees of 
knowledge and aid, according to need, sometimes suggesting new truth, 
sometimes presiding over the selection of preexisting material, though always 
guarding from error in the final elaboration. It did not always, nor even 
generally, involve a direct communication to the Scripture writers of the 
words they wrote. Thought is possible without words, and in the order of 
nature precedes words. The Scripture writers appear to have been so 
influenced by the Holy Spirit, that they perceived and felt even the new 
truths they were to publish as discoveries of their own minds, and were left 
to the action of their own minds in the expression of these truths, with this 
single exception that they were supernaturally held back from the selection 
of wrong words, and when needful were provided with right ones. Inspira- 
tion is therefore verbal as to its result, but not verbal as to its method. 

Yet in all this work of preparation and composition, although the writers 
of Scripture used their natural power and opportunities as fully as they 
would have done in purely secular composition, they were possessed and 
animated by the Spirit of God. Notwithstanding the ever-present human 
element, there is an all-pervading inspiration of the Scriptures which consti- 
tutes these various writings an organic whole. The Bible is in all its parts 
the word of God. Hence each part is to be judged, not by itself alone, but 
in its connection with every other part. The Scriptures are not to be inter- 
preted as so many merely human productions by different authors, but also 
as the work of one divine Mind. In many an expression of prophet or 
apostle, that divine Mind may have intended to communicate more than was 
present to the consciousness of the human author. Seemingly trivial things 
are to be explained from their connection with the whole. One history is 
to be built up from the several accounts of the life of Christ. One doctrine 
must supplement another. The Old Testament is part of a progressive 
system, whose culmination and key are to be found in the New. The central 
subject and thought which binds all parts of the Bible together, and in the 
light of which they are to be interpreted, is the person and work of Jesus 
Christ. 

This, then, is the sum of what we have said : The Scriptures, except in 
portions of insignificant extent, were not on the one hand written from 
dictation, nor on the other hand composed by men who derived their general 
ideas from God, while they were left to themselves so far as the expression 
of those ideas was concerned. Rather must we hold to a possession and 
enlightenment of the writers in all parts of their work, yet such a possession 
and enlightenment as left them in the fullest exercise of their natural powers. 
When they wrote, they wrote in the method and vocabulary of their time, 
and out of their present conscious experience under the influence of the 
Spirit. Balaam could not have written the Gospel according to John, nor 
oould Paul have indited the Pentateuch. When they made researches they 
were guided by God ; when they committed the results of their researches to 
writing, he kept them back from error either in matter or in expression. 
When they were called to prophesy of things to come, the Holy Spirit 



THE METHOD OF INSPIRATION. 155 

opened the future to them ; when they gave directions to the churches, they 
did it in the wisdom which only the Holy Spirit could impart. But in all 
this there was nothing blind, nothing mechanical, nothing passive. They 
were as truly the authors of what they wrote as was the Holy Spirit. As 
John Ix)cke said: "When God made the prophet, he did not unmake the 
man." 

Two questions need to be answered before this discussion can be regarded 
as sufficient. The first is this: Are all parts of Scripture inspired? We 
reply : All parts of Scripture are inspired in their connection and relation to 
each other. No statement of the Bible can be taken out from its context. 
and be called complete truth by itself. We read in Scripture the words : 
"There is no God ; " but we have no difficulty in holding these to be inspired 
when we take them as part of the verse: "The fool hath said in his heart, 
There is no God." This principle is of universal application, and next to 
the principle of combined human and divine authorship, we regard this one 
of the articulated and organic unity of all Scripture as the most important 
to an understanding of the fact of inspiration. — The second question is this : 
Are there degrees of inspiration ? We answer : There are degrees of value, 
but not degrees of inspiration. Each part of Scripture is rendered com- 
pletely true, when interpreted according to its actual meaning, and complete- 
ness has no degrees. All parts of the human body have life, and all are 
indispensable to the perfect whole. Yet we should miss the brain more than 
we should miss the hair that covers it, and the heart more than the hand 
into which it sends its blood. For all this, he would talk absurdly who 
should speak of the different parts of the body as having different degrees of 
life. So the Gospels may be of greater value to us than the minor prophets, 
and yet the inspiration of the latter be as complete as that of the former. 

Thus we have endeavored to set forth a connected view of the method of 
inspiration. We have approached the subject without controversial refer- 
ence to recent discussions of it — with irenic, rather than polemic, intent. 
We are convinced that the contemplation of the theme from the point of 
view which we have chosen, however imperfect and fragmentary our own 
treatment may have been, will enlarge our conceptions not only of the 
mysterious greatness, but also of the genuine reasonableness, of the doctrine 
of inspiration. 



158 CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM. 

seat of Christ. There each shall receive according to the deeds done in his 
own hody. And there, for me and for you, if we are unsaved, must be an 
unveiling of the secrets of the heart and the visiting upon each of a pecu- 
liar guilt, and shame, and condemnation. Ah, when I think of my individual 
sins, with all their peculiar aggravations, I can see how, in some particulars 
and aspects, I may be in my unique personality an illustration of the enor- 
mity and hatefulness of sin such as neither earth nor hell can elsewhere 
show. And what is true of me is true of you. In virtue of this great fact 
of individuality, both you and I should call ourselves, as Paul called himself, 
the "chief of sinners;" should acknowledge, with the prophet Amos, our 
"manifold transgressions" and "mighty sins;" aye, each one of us should 
cry, as the Publican cried, "God be merciful to me, the sinner," as if there 
were no other sinner upon the footstool so great as he. 

A second inference is this: If every man is a peculiar icing, then a 
peculiar wisdom and grace of God are needed to save him. It is not 
enough for God to decree salvation for the church as a whole. He must 
set his love upon me and choose me. A merely general election might not 
include a case so singular as mine has been. — It will not do for Jesus to die 
simply for the race at large. He must die for me, as if there were no other 
to be saved: for only a most particular and personal sacrifice of the Son of 
God could reach my case and atone for my sins. And so the believer looks 
to the cross and says: "My sins gave sharpness to the nails, and pointed 
every thorn." "The Saviour died for me." "He loved me, and gave him- 
self for me." — It will not do for Christ to offer a merely general pardon to 
offenders. No, there is something in every sinner's case, when the Holy 
Spirit enlightens him, that seems so peculiarly wicked as to go beyond all 
ordinary bounds of sin, to make him an exceptional case of transgression, 
and to put him beyond the reach of mercy. The convicted sinner feels like 
Peter, after he had denied his Master, that though there may be salvation 
for others, there can be none for him. But just as Christ after his resurrec- 
tion said: "Go, tell Peter," and so intimated the granting of a special par- 
don for his particular case, so to every such sinner he sends by his Holy 
Spirit a special message of forgiveness, and says: "Thy sins, which are 
many, are forgiven thee; go in peace." — It is not enough that Jesus should 
ask blessings for his followers in the mass, now that he has ascended his 
throne; for my needs are such as are found nowhere else but in my own 
soul. He must intercede particularly for me, with my idiosyncrasies and 
special temptations ; for the grace that saves others will never be sufficient 
to save me. Christ can say to me, as he said to Peter: "I have prayed for 
thee, that thy faith fail not." — It is not enough that Christ should bestow on 
me simply the common influences of his Spirit, — the same influences 
which are bestowed upon all. There are peculiar depths of my nature that 
must be reached ; peculiar and serpentlike convolutions of my wicked heart 
that must be untwisted ; peculiar intensities of evil ambition and self-exalta- 
tion that must be subdued, if I am ever to be saved. To convert and to 
sanctify each sinner, demands a mighty operation and process of the divine 
Spirit, different from any other that he has ever wrought. — It is not enough 
that God should lead me by his Providence as he leads others. No, "he 
calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out." "He leadeth me," 



CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM. 159 

aye, "he leadeth the blind by a way that they knew not" — knew not, be- 
cause no other soul ever was so led, or could be. 

Does not this strange fact of our individuality throw light upon our past 
experience? You have sometimes asked: 'Why hast thou made me thus?" 
" Why hast thou so dealt with me?" Well, it is evident, at least, that there 
has been a peculiar dealing of God, corresponding to your peculiar nature. 
You needed a peculiar care and discipline, and just what you needed God 
has given to you. Is it not a matter of profound gratitude that infinite wis- 
dom can give a personal attention to you and your salvation, as perfectly as 
if there were no other to care for in the universe? My friends, we are not 
saved in a lump. There are peculiar dealings of God with each individual 
Boul. My experience is mine, and yours is yours, and there is no possibility 
of exchanging them. Just as each separate soldier has an experience of his 
own in battle, and just as each rescued passenger can tell a different story 
of shipwreck, so each history of salvation will have a thrilling interest of its 
own. No other being in all God's universe has been saved just as I have 
been. The multitude of God's thoughts toward me is more than I can num- 
ber. In the record of its varied experiences under the mighty influences of 
God's Providence and God's Spirit, shall be made known by the c.'aurch, to 
the principalities and powers in heavenly places, the manifold wisdom of 
God. Each soul redeemed and brought to glory shall have a new name, 
which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it — the sign manual of God 
stamped upon him in a way unique and incommunicable. And each soul 
will sing with an emphasis and meaning all its own : 

" Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, 
That saved a wretch like me! " 

There is a third inference: If every man is a peculiar being, then every 
man has a peculiar tcorlc for God to do. Just as there was a man sent 
from God whose name was John, and that John the Baptist had a peculiar 
work to do, corresponding to his nature and endowments, so there is another 
man sent from God whose name is — your name, whatever that may be. It 
is not for nothing that God has made you just as you are, and has treated 
you just as he has. The children's hymn explains it all : 

" Dare to do right, dare to be true: 
You have a work that no other can do ! " 

"Every man for himself" — in a Christian sense. As you are peculiarly 
constituted, as you have peculiar gifts and opportunities, as you have had a 
peculiar experience of God's forbearing love and saving grace, so you pecu- 
liarly represent Christ, so you are to reflect a peculiar honor on your Savior 
and your King. There is a peculiar testimony you can give to Christ which 
no other man on earth can give. Secret communications of God's truth and 
grace have been made to you. They are bid from all the universe besides. 
Your peculiar course of development and education is a matter of interest to 
angelic beings, and it is you who are to make known what God has done for 
you. There is a peculiar crown which you, and no other, can cast at the Re- 
deemer's feet; aye, throughout eternity, there is a peculiar phase of the 
image of Christ which you are to reflect, and a peculiar service to him which 
you are to render, and a peculiar glory which you are to give to his great 
name. 



158 CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM. 

seat of Christ. There each shall receive according to the deeds done in his 
own body. And there, for me and fur you, if we arc unsaved, must be an 
unveiling of the secrets of the heart and the visiting upon each of a pecu- 
liar guilt, and shame, and condemnation. Ah, when I think of my individual 
sins, with all their peculiar aggravations, I can see how, in some particulars 
and aspects, I may be in my unique personality an illustration of the enor- 
mity and hatefulness of sin such as neither earth nor hell can elsewhere 
show. And what is true of me is true of yon. In virtue of this great fact 
of individuality, both you and I should call omsebes. as Paul called himself, 
the "chief of sinners;" should acknowledge, with the prophet Amos, our 
"manifold transgressions" and "mighty sins;" aye, each one of us should 
cry, as the Publican cried, "God be merciful to me, the sinner," as if there 
were no other sinner upon the footstool so great as he. 

A second inference is this: If every man is a peculiar being, then a 
peculiar wisdom and grace of God are needed to save hint. It is not 
enough for God to decree salvation for the church as a whole. He must 
set his love upon me and choose me. A merely general election might not 
include a case so singular as mine has been. — It will not do for Jesus to die 
simply for the race at large. He must die for me, as if there were no other 
to be saved: for only a most particular and personal sacrifice of the Son of 
God could reach my case and atone for my sins. And so the believer looks 
to the cross and says: "My sins gave sharpness to the nails, and pointed 
every thorn." "The Saviour died for me." "He loved me, and gave him- 
self for me." — It will not do for Christ to offer a merely general pardon to 
offenders. No, there is something in every sinner's case, when the Holy 
Spirit enlightens him, that seems so peculiarly wicked as to go beyond all 
ordinary bounds of sin, to make him an exceptional case of transgression, 
and to put him beyond the reach of mercy. The convicted sinner feels like 
Peter, after he had denied his Master, that though there may be salvation 
for others, there can be none for him. But just as Christ after his resurrec- 
tion said: "Go, tell Peter," and so intimated the granting of a special par- 
don for his particular case, so to every such sinner he sends by his Holy 
Spirit a special message of forgiveness, and says: "Thy sins, which are 
many, are forgiven thee; go in peace." — It is not enough that Jesus should 
ask blessings for his followers in the mass, now that he has ascended his 
throne; for my needs are such as are found nowhere else but in my own 
soul. He must intercede particularly for me, with my idiosyncrasies and 
special temptations ; for the grace that saves others will never be sufficient 
to save me. Christ can say to me, as he said to Peter: "I have prayed for 
thee, that thy faith fail not." — It is not enough that Christ should bestow on 
me simply the common influences of his Spirit, — the same influences 
which are bestowed upon all. There are peculiar depths of my nature that 
must be reached ; peculiar and serpentlike convolutions of my wicked heart 
that must be untwisted; peculiar intensities of evil ambition and self-exalta- 
tion that must be subdued, if I am ever to be saved. To convert and to 
sanctify each sinner, demands a mighty operation and process of the divine 
Spirit, different from any other that he has ever wrought. — It is not enough 
that God should lead me by his Providence as he leads others. No, "he 
calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out." "He leadeth me," 



CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM. 159 

aye, "he leadeth the blind by a way that they knew not" — knew not, be- 
cause no other soul ever was so led, or could be. 

Does not this strange fact of our individuality throw light upon our past 
experience? You have sometimes asked: "Why hast thou made me thus?" 
"Why hast tliou so dealt with me?" Well, it is evident, at least, that there 
has been a peculiar dealing of God, corresponding to your peculiar nature. 
You needed a peculiar care and discipline, and just what you needed God 
has given to you. Is it not a matter of profound gratitude that infinite wis- 
dom can give a personal attention to you and your salvation, as perfectly as 
if there were no other to care for in the universe? My friends, we are not 
saved in a lump. There are peculiar dealings of God with each individual 
soul. My experience is mine, and yours is yours, and there Is no possibility 
of exchanging them. Just as each separate soldier has an experience of his 
own in battle, and just as each rescued passenger can tell a different story 
of shipwreck, so each history of salvation will have a thrilling interest of its 
own. No other being in all God's universe has been saved just as I have 
been. The multitude of God's thoughts toward me is more than I can num- 
ber. In the record of its varied experiences under the mighty influences of 
God's Providence and God's Spirit, shall be made known by the church, to 
the principalities and powers in heavenly places, the manifold wisdom of 
God. Each soul redeemed and brought to glory shall have a new name, 
which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it — the sigu manual of God 
stamped upon him in a way unique and incommunicable. And each soul 
will sing with an emphasis and meaning all its own : 

" Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, 
That saved a wretch like me!" 

There is a third inference: If every man is a peculiar oeing, then every 
man has a peculiar work for God to do. Just as there was a man sent 
from God whose name was John, and that John the Baptist had a peculiar 
work to do, corresponding to his nature and endowments, so there is another 
man sent from God whose name is — your name, whatever that may be. It 
is not for nothing that God has made you just as you are, and has treated 
you just as he has. The children's hymn explains it all : 

" Dare to do right, dare to be true: 
You have a work that no other can do ! " 

"Every man for himself" — in a Christian sense. As you are peculiarly 
constituted, as you have peculiar gifts and opportunities, as you have had a 
peculiar experience of God's forbearing love and saving grace, so you pecu- 
liarly represent Christ, so you are to reflect a peculiar honor on your Savior 
and your King. There is a peculiar testimony you can give to Christ which 
no other man on earth can give. Secret communications of God's truth and 
grace have been made to you. They are hid from all the universe besides. 
Your peculiar course of development and education is a matter of interest to 
angelic beings, and it is you who are to make known what God has done for 
you. There is a peculiar crown which you, and no other, can cast at the Re- 
deemer's feet; aye, throughout eternity, there is a peculiar phase of the 
image of Christ which you are to reflect, and a peculiar service to him which 
you are to render, and a peculiar glory which you are to give to his great 



1G0 CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM. 

1 confess that I rejoice to think that I am to be of some peculiar use: that 
I can do something that no other being can do ; that God has made me an 
indispensable part of his plan of revealing himself to the universe. How is 
it with you, my hearer? Do you not think it a great thing to be made some- 
thing of by God? And do you not see the folly and the crime of wisning 
to be somebody else; of hiding yourself behind somebody else; of neglecting 
your own work because somebody else does not do his? When the master 
in the parable went into a far country, he apportioned to his servants, "to 
every man his work." The talents were distributed to every man according 
to his ability. Paul explains the parable when he says: "To each one is 
given the manifestation of the Spirit, to profit withal." And Peter tells the 
whole story of our duty, when he says: "As every man hath received the 
gift, even so minister the same to another, as good stewards of the manifold 
grace of God." In other words: God's grace is manifold, varied, multitudi- 
nous, as the number of his redeemed. Each rescued soul, however humble, 
has his peculiar endowment of nature and of the spirit. According to the 
quality and extent of God's gifts to us, we are to minister to others, as faith- 
ful stewards who have received these gifts, not that we may spend them upon 
ourselves, but that we may employ them for the interest of the owner, and 
for the good of the souls whom he died to save. 

I would that this solemn thought of the peculiarity of our work might not 
be lost upon us. It is so easy to think that if we do not do our work some 
one else may do it for us. Oh, remember that, being different from every 
other, no other man or angel can ever take your place. If you do not do 
your work, your work will not be done. It is so easy to say: "I will do 
this, upon condition that some other person will do that." Oh, remember 
that you are a solitary individual before God, and that he says to you as 
Christ said to Peter, when he asked what John should do : " What is that 
to thee? follow thou me." It is so easy to make others' doing, or ability to 
do, the measure of our own. Oh, remember that each one of us shall give 
account of himself to God ; that to whom much has been given, of him much 
shall be required ; that even he who had the one talent, and hid it, was cast 
out and rejected, because he had not made it into two. 

I have said that this individuality implies peculiar sins on our part and 
peculiar grace on the part of God. I have said that it implies that every 
man has a peculiar work for God to do. But our theme will not be complele 
without a fourth inference. If every man is a peculiar being, then for 
every faithful worker there is a peculiar reward. Rewards in God's 
administration are matters of grace, not of debt ; and yet we are to be 
rewarded "according to our works." Not on account of our works, as if 
by working we could put God under obligation to us, but according to our 
works — in proportion to what we have done and the faithfulness with which 
we have done it. There is a sense in which the rewards of all shall be the 
same. The laborers in the vineyard each one received his penny. So in 
the great future all souls will be equally full of the love and goodness of 
God — full to the utmost measure of their capacity. But then their capaci- 
ties shall differ, and one shall be able to hold more than another. A small 
pail can be just as full as a great tub, but the great vessel can hold much 
more than the small one. And the difference In reward shall be determined 



CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM. 161 

by the peculiarities of the service each man has rendered. He who gives 
even the cup of cold water in the name of a disciple shall in no wise lose his 
peculiar reward. The servant whose pound has gained five pounds shall 
be rewarded with authority over five cities, and the servant whose pound 
has gained ten pounds shall be rewarded with authority over ten. 

But the peculiarity of the reward shall be graduated, not only to tha 
peculiarity of the work that each has done, but to the peculiarity of tha 
nature of him who receives it. Joy shall be the reward of heaven — but it 
shall be in each case a joy with which a stranger intermeddleth not. "Your 
joy no man taketh from you." It is a joy which the highest archangel 
cannot share, because it is the vibrating of all the strings of a peculiar nature 
at the soft touch of the fingers of infinite Love. — Power shall be the reward 
of heaven. The power of complete self-mastery will be a peculiar reward, 
because no other soul in the universe can know the struggles through which 
your soul has passed in resisting its peculiar temptations and in subduing 
its peculiar sins. George Eliot once said that the reward of a duty done is 
the power to do another. As with every new work for Christ accomplished 
we pass on to larger and larger achievement, peculiar power of service shall 
be the reward of the peculiar gifts and endowments which we lay at the 
Master's feet. — Love shall be the reward of the faithful — a love that shall 
admit the great love of God to fill up all the interstices and gaps and empti- 
nesses of our natures, as water poured into a bowl not only fills it full, but 
adapts itself to the peculiar form of the vessel that contains it. — Holiness 
shall be the reward of the faithful. There is a mineral called diaphane that 
becomes transparent only in water. It shall be the blessing of heaven that 
this being of ours, now so clouded and opaque through the effects of sin, 
shall be immersed in the divine purity, and in that bath of regeneration shall 
be made pure as God is pure. — God himself shall be the reward of heaven 
— a God who can adapt himself with infinite inventiveness and wisdom to 
every peculiarity of the beings he has made, can be seen from a different 
point of view by every separate mind, and can be felt in a different way by 
each separate heart of all those he has redeemed. Shakespeare has been 
called the myriad-minded, but there is no end to the sides and aspects of 
God's being, and no finite mind can know the whole. The great reward of 
heaven will be that each redeemed soul can say: " O, God, thou art my 
God!" 

So the reward will be peculiar, as the nature, and the sin, and the grace, 
and the work, are peculiar. The reward will be the raising to the highest 
power, and the exalting to the intensest activity, of that peculiar faculty and 
endowment which God imparted to the soul at the beginning. Here is a 
Christian evolution that passes in grandeur and dignity all that material 
evolution of which scientific men delight to speak. They tell us of a world 
thrown off from a fiery revolving nebula, chaotic and formless at the first, 
but gradually assuming outline and order, and bringing forth a constantly 
increasing variety of life and beauty. I can hear the sons of God shouting 
for joy, as God says "Let there be light!" and the ordered sphere goes 
whirling by ; and I can conceive of those same angelic hosts adoring yet more 
that wisdom that in the long course of its subsequent history has made the 
germinal world planted so long ago amid the great spaces of the universe to 
11 



162 CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM. 

develop into such beauty and glory of mountain and field and flood. But 
there is another evolution grander than all this. It is found in the history 
of a redeemed soul. Springing at its beginning from the creative hand of 
God, a mere rudimentary germ of life and mind, it passes into the chaos and 
night of sin, until that same omnipotent Word that called the light out of 
darkness causes to shine in upon it the light of the knowledge of the glory 
of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Then the long training of the rescued 
spirit, through providence and grace, through temptation and affliction, 
through Christian work and achievement, until the soul reaches a full-orbed 
manhood in Christ Jesus. On and still on shall the process go, labor becom- 
ing more and more the highest rest, work becoming more and more reward, 
every faculty developed to greatness, every peculiar excellence brought to a 
unique and unexampled beauty, until as the sons of God see this spiritual 
product of God's wisdom go sweeping by, they shall be compelled to say 
that it passes in glory all the thrones and dominions and principalities and 
powers of their celestial hierarchy, that its history illustrates God's might 
and foreseeing wisdom better than all the material worlds that float in space, 
that its heights of intellectual and moral greatness are more glorious than the 
whiteness of Alpine summits when smitten by the first light of the rising 
sun, that its capacities for loving and expressing God are greater than the 
depths of ocean when they reflect the untroubled glory of the starlit skies. 

When I think of the magnificent developments of individuality which the 
great future shall witness, of the grand array of crowned heads which heaven 
will present, each one a ruler over his own principality and all of them kings 
and priests unto God, I look back with horror to the awful perversity of 
Satan's lie to our first parents: "Ye shall be as God, knowing good and 
evil." Seeking to be a God to himself, all these noble prospects of endless 
development were blasted and swept away. But in Christ they are all re- 
stored. It is not yet made manifest what we shall be, but we know that if 
he shall be manifested we shall be like him, for we shall see him even as he 
is. Eye hath not seen, nor hath ear heard, neither hath entered into the 
heart of man, what God hath prepared for them that love him. We shall 
judge angels, and all things shall be ours, because we are Christ's, and 
Christ is God's. It was written of ancient judges: "I said ye are gods." 
The name of gods was given them, because they were the representatives of 
God and were filled with his Spirit. So we shall be gods ia the world to 
come, because in this unique and peculiar nature which belongs to each of 
us God shall dwell and manifest himself. We shall shine like the sun in 
the kingdom of our Father, because we live forever in the light of him who 
is the one and only Sun. 

God help us then each one to say: "I am unlike every other soul that 
God ever made. I have sinned as no other ever has. He has saved me, and 
led me, in a different way from any other. I owe to him therefore a kind 
and quality of service such as no other human being has ever rendered. I 
am bound to. have views of truth and of duty such as no other Christian ever 
had. I am bound to mark out for myself a course of spiritual development 
and a plan of outward work that shall be as original as the leadings of God. 
So only can I be a true man in Christ, an independent actor in history, a 
living force under God in the development of his plans, a king forever in 



CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM. 1G3 

God's kingdom." It is to this lofty development of Christian individuality 
that God calls us — to be Christ's lieutenants in the universe. Oh, you who 
love power ! take the lasting, the eternal power that comes through serving 
Christ. Use mind, heart and will, your ability to plan and to give, your 
voice and influence, your capacity to work and your power of getting others 
to work — use all these in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ now 
and here, and he will not only fill you with his Spirit and make you a master 
of circumstances and a master of men, but he will perpetuate your power 
beyond death, and increase it throughout the great hereafter; for he himself 
has said: "To him that overcometh, will I give to sit down with me in my 
throne, even as I also overcame and sat down with my Father in his throne." 



XII. 
THE NEW THEOLOGY." 



The New Theology, so called, is a theology of exaggerated individual- 
ism. What this means, and what are the errors and probable results of the 
system, wiy. appear as we go on. It is well to remember, however, that the 
new always has its roots in the old, and before describing the phenomenon 
of the present I wish to mention some of its historical connections in the past. 

I trace the history of this tendency in theology as far back as to the nomi- 
nalism of Roscelin, Duns Scotus, and Occam. To these philosophers, general 
conceptions have their source only in the mind ; there is nothing correspond- 
ing to them in the actual world. Genera and species are mere names ; indi- 
viduals are the only realities. Upon this view, science is the study only of 
units ; in truth, there can be no science, for science would imply law and 
the binding of particulars into unity. 

There is of course a realism equally objectionable — the realism which 
would hold to the independent existence of universals — the horse in general, 
apart from all individual horses. With Dr. H. B. Smith, we "hold to unx- 
versalia in re, but insist that the universals must be recognized as rcalitirss, 
as truly as the individuals are." 

There have been two chief applications of this nominalistic principle in 
theology : the first is its application to the nature of God ; the second, its 
application to the nature of man. In the former case the result has been 
either a practical tritheism on the one hand, which denies the possibility of 
a divine nature without a divine person, and so holds that there must be 
three Gods because there are three who possess a divine nature; or on the 
other hand a practical unitarianism, which holds that as there is but one 
God, so only one person can possess the divine nature. Nestorianism for a 
similar reason held that Christ was two persons instead of one, because it 
could not conceive of human nature in him without independence and indi- 
viduality. 

Nominalism has, moreover, conceived of the divine attributes as mere 
names, with which, by a necessity of our thinking, we clothe the one simple 
divine essence. It holds that the attributes are not distinct from God's essence 
or from each other. This is to deny that we can know God at all ; for know- 
ing is not possible without distinguishing. Yet this false tendency to regard 
God as a being of absolute simplicity has infected much of the post-reforma- 
tion theology, and is found as recently as Schleiermacher, Rothe. and Ols- 
hausen. Schleiermacher makes all the attributes to be modifications of 
power; Rothe, of omniscience; and Olshausen attempts to prove that the 



• Printed in the Baptist Quarterly Review, for January, 1888. 
104 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 1G. - . 

Word of God must have objective and substantial being, by assuming that 
knowing is equivalent to willing; whence it would seem to follow that, since 
God wills all he knows, he must will moral evil. It is only an application 
of the same principle when we find Horace Bushnell, one of the progenitors 
of the New Theology, identifying righteousness in God with benevolence, 
and denying for that reason that any atonement needs to be made to God. 
Herbert Spencer only carries the principle further when he concludes God 
to be simple unknowable force. Hence we can adopt the statement of Tho- 
masius: "If God were the simply One, to airAw ev, the mystic abyss in which 
every form of determination were extinguished, there would be nothing in 
the unity to be known." Hence "nominalism is incompatible with the idea 
of revelation. We teach, with realism, that the attributes of God are objec- 
tive determinations in his revelations, and as such are rooted in his inmost 
essence." 

More important, however, for our present purpose is the application of 
nominalism to the nature of man. Mankind upon this view is but a collec- 
tion of individuals. The race is not an organic whole. Souls are individu- 
ally created by God, not propagated with the body from a common stock. 
There is no such thing as an archetypal humanity, of which each man is a 
natural evolution and a partial illustration. The genus "man" is but a 
name which we attach to the multitude of individual men. This is the 
atomistic account of humanity ; individual men have as little organic connec- 
tion with each other as the sand-grains in a sand-hill. They influence one 
another as do the bricks which children set up in a row — each receives the 
impact of its next neighbor entirely from without, and there is no living 
unity between them. Hence there can be no common fall of humanity in 
its first father — each man falls by himself and for himself, just as each angel 
did. It would seem to follow that there can be no common salvation, and 
that Christ can be no more the source of a new humanity to believers, than 
Adam was the source of sin and guilt to the race at large. There is no con- 
demnation in Adam, there is no justification in Christ ; for there is no real 
union of humanity with either. 

Over against this nominalistic conception of humanity, I put the realistic 
doctrine which I regard as implicitly contained in Scripture. This regards 
humanity at large as the outgrowth of one germ. Let me illustrate my 
meaning. Though the leaves of a tree appear as disconnected units when 
we look down upon them from above, a view from beneath will discern the 
common connection with the twigs, branches, trunk, and will finally trace 
their life to the root, and to the seed from which it originally sprang. So 
the race of man is one, because it sprang from one head. Its members are 
not to be regarded only atomistically, as segregated individuals ; the deeper 
truth is the truth of organic unity. Yet we are not realists of the mediaeval 
sort. We do not believe in the separate existence of universals. Our real- 
ism only asserts the real historical connection of each member of the race 
with its first father and head, and such a derivation of each from him as 
makes us partakers of the character which he formed. Adam was once the 
race ; when he fell, the race fell ; we have the very nature which transgressed 
and corrupted itself in him. I may add that the new conceptions of the 
reign of law and of the principle of heredity which prevail in modern science 



1G6 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

are working to the advantage of Christian theology. The doctrine of Alain's 
natural headship is only a doctrine of the hereditary transmission of char- 
acter from the first father of the race to his descendants. I do not deny 
man's individuality and personal responsibility; I only deny that this is the 
whole truth. Besides personal sin, there is race-sin. The New Theology is 
false by defect. It is the theology of nominalism. It regards man simply 
as an individual. It holds that each human soul is immediately created by 
God and lias no other relations to moral law than those which are individual ; 
whereas, all human souls are organically connected with each other, and 
together have a corporate relation to God's law, by virtue of their derivation 
from one common stock. 

The second source to which I trace the New Theology is the idealism of 
Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, or rather the modern idealism of which 
these philosophers are earlier and later representatives. This general method 
of thought regards the mind as conversant only with ideas. The tendency 
has its root in Locke's teaching that all the materials of our knowledge come 
originally from sensation ; the mind only examines and rearranges the 
impressions received from sense ; carry the principle a little further, and we 
must maintain that all we know of an external world is these impressions — 
the external world is, in fact, nothing but these impressions, and this of 
course implies a denial that any such thing as substance is known at all. 
Here again is exaggerated individualism — the reduction of all knowledge 
to the knowledge of particulars. This individualism, applied to matter, 
makes things to be only thoughts ; and Berkeley saves the unity of the 
external world, not by recognizing created substance in which qualities 
inhere, but by referring the impressions we receive directly to God the Cre- 
ator. Hume justly thought it a poor rule that would not work both ways, 
and he applied the rule not only to matter but to mind. The same individ- 
ualism which denies substance in the outer world must logically deny 
substance in the inner world ; we need no soul within, any more than we 
need matter without; what we call soul is but a series of ideas — a string of 
beads without any string. Hume apparently did not see that the very first 
"impression" presupposes the existence of something to be impressed, that 
is, presupposes a soul within ; just as the cognition of quality presupposes 
something to which the quality belongs, that is, presupposes material sub- 
stance without. Yet Mill and Spencer have followed along this same line, 
and are equally with Hume sensational philosophers. 

It is easy to see how the refusal to recognize the validity of the mind's 
intuitive cognition of substance should result in the loss of God as well as 
the loss of the soul. Kant maintained that things conform to cognition, not 
cognition to things. Things in themselves are unknown. Behind phenom- 
ena lies a world which human reason cannot penetrate. Compelled to think- 
as we are, we can never know whether or not the reality corresponds to our 
thought. No wonder that Hegel rebelled against this agnosticism, and went 
to the opposite extreme of maintaining that the process of thought guaran- 
teed its own validity; that thought, in fact, was existence, and existence was 
thought. Hence in his system we have the merging of reality in a thought- 
process; thought thinks; there is thinking without a thinker. There Is no 
need of postulating any divine essence, any more than there Is need of 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 167 

postulating any substance for the world or for the soul. God becomes a 
universal, but impersonal, intelligence and will ; an intelligence and will that 
come to consciousness only in man. It is only fair to say that will, even in 
man, never reaches a self-determination that can be called freedom ; and 
intelligence in man never reaches a proper self -consciousness ; for how can 
either of these be, where there is no real substantial self? Soul is not 
rcognizcd as anything separate from the whole of which it forms a part, 
and of which it is the necessary manifestation. So idealism, aiming to save 
the life of thought, really loses it ; refusing to recognize substance or essence, 
and confining itself to particulars, it finally gives up the individuality both 
of man and of God. 

Not all idealists, however, carry the system to its logical conclusions. 
Many a modern theologian has adopted idealistic principles without con- 
sistently applying them. The doctrine of the immanence of God which 
forms so large an element in the New Theology has been derived from ideal- 
istic sources, and is distinctly Berkeleian and Hegelian in its spirit. The 
theology of Elisha Mulford, Theodore T. Munger, and Newman Smyth, is 
a theology which tends to make God in the human spirit the only cause. 
God and man are still recognized as personal, but the life of man is merged 
to a large extent in the life of God. Internal revelation is substituted for 
external; all men are conceived of as more or less inspired; the boundaries 
between the natural and the supernatural are broken down. Some recent 
writers * pride themselves on having discovered anew the thought which 
made the early church so devoted and yet so active — the thought that in 
God we live and move and have our being, and they ascribe the decline of 
Christianity to the fact that Augustine and Calvin lost sight of it, and looked 
upon God, after a deistic fashion, as a mechanical contriver of the universe 
and a worker upon it from without. As if some of the noblest utterances of 
this great truth of God's immanence had not proceeded from Augustine's 
and from Calvin's lips ! t Let us give all proper emphasis to the truth of 
God's immanence; let us grant that it did not receive sufficient attention in 
the days of Butler and Paley ; let us welcome the new light that is thrown 
upon it to-day. But, then, let us equally remember that God not only 
speaks with the still, small voice in the constitution of man and in the course 
of human history, but also by outward miracles of healing and resurrection, 
by the incarnation and death of his Son, and by the external revelations of 
Scripture. God's immanence is a vast truth; but we must not let it hide 
from our eyes the other truth of God's transcendence. He who is "in all," 
and "through all," is also "above all;" and, if he had not by miracle 
proved his transcendence, we probably should never have believed in his 
immanence. 

It is mainly, however, through the identity-system of Jonathan Edwards 
that idealism has influenced the New Theology. To this identity-system, 
therefore, as its third source, I trace the movement in thought which I am 
considering. 

There can be no doubt that Jonathan Edwards was an idealist. We do 



* See Allen, Continuity of Religious Thought. 
t See Augustine's Confessions, I : I. 



168 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

not know that he ever met Berkeley, during the Bishop's stay in America, or 
that he ever read a work of Berkeley's, though Berkeley's Principles of 
Human Knowledge was published before Edwards's Freedom of the Will. 
It was probably through Dr. Samuel Johnson, Berkeley's American friend 
and disciple, and Jonathan Edwards's teacher at Yale College, that Edwards 
received his first bent to idealism.* The latter gives us his own statement 
of philosophical doctrine, as follows : 

"When I say the material universe exists only in the mind, I mean that it 
is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence; and 
does not exist as spirits do, whose existence does not ((insist in, nor in de- 
pendence on, the conceptions of other minds. . . . All existence is mental 
.... the existence of all exterior things is ideal. . . . That which truly is 
the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly 
stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall 
gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to fixed and 
exact established methods and laws." 

Jonathan Edwards was no traducian. Yet he was a believer in original 
sin, and held to such a unity of Adam's posterity with their first father as 
made them justly responsible for his first sin. This unity was constituted, 
not by the historical descent of the bodies and souls of Adam's posterity 
from the body and soul of Adam, but rather by the idea and will of God, 
which can make any two things to be identical. The radical error in his 
philosophy was his denial of substance. The past existence of the moon in 
the heavens is not the cause of its present existence — God's will is the cause ; 
preservation is a continuous creation ; every instant the moon is new-created 
by God. Similarly, Edwards had no thought of a common humanity, flow- 
ing by natural generation from Adam to us, and still less had he the idea of 
a realistic presence of the race in its first father. A union with Adam in 
acts and exercises is sufficient, and such a union exists by divine decree. 
The idea of this unity, in God's mind, itself constitutes the realty. Our 
sinful acts and exercises are Adam's, and Adam's acts and exercises are ours. 

So Edwards held that God imputes Adam's sin to his posterity by arbi- 
trarily identifying them with him- — identity, on the theory of continuous 
creation, being only what God appoints. I do not mean that this is a com- 
plete account of Edwards's doctrine of sin. Since God's appointment did 
not furnish sufficient ground for imputation, Edwards joined the Placean 
doctrine to the other, and showed the justice of the condemnation by the 
fact that man is depraved. He added, moreover, the consideration that man 
ratifies this depravity by his own act. Thus he tried to combine three views. 
But all were vitiated by his doctrine of continuous creation, which logically 
made God the only cause in the universe, and left no freedom, guilt or 
responsibility to man. He thought too little of sin as a nature, and located 
responsibility too much in the acts and exercises which we put forth. It is 
no wonder that his followers repudiated his doctrine of the union of our 
acts and exercises with Adam's, and denied that sin is in any sense a nature. 
Baird, in his Elohim Revealed, has remarked that Edwards's idea that the 
character of an act is to be sought somewhere else than in its cause involves 
the fallacious assumption that acts have a subsistence and moral agency of 
their own, apart from that of the actor. 

This divergence from the truth led to the exercise-system of Hopkins and 



* Krauth, Berkeley's Principles of Knowlcdne, Prolegomena, pages 36 and 
37. 



THE NEW* THEOLOGY. 169 

Emmons, who not only denied moral character prior to individual choices, 
that is, denied sin of nature, but attributed all human acts and exercises to 
the direct efficiency of God. Hopkins declared: "All power is in God. 
This is the proper efficient cause of every event. All creatures which act or 
move, exist and move or are moved, by him." * Emmons said: "We can- 
not conceive that even omnipotence is able to form independent agents, 
because this would be to endow them with divinity. And since all men are 
dependent agents, all these motions, exercises, or actions must originate in 
a divine efficiency." t God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, 
and effects by his almighty power all changes in the material world. Accord- 
ing to this view, the contact of fire with the finger, the stroke of the axe on 
the tree, are only the occasions — divine omnipotence is the cause — of the 
tree's falling and the finger's burning. All causal connections between the 
different objects of the universe are at an end. No such things as physical 
forces exist. Nature becomes a mere phantom, and God is the only cause 
in the universe. It seems plain to me that this doctrine tends to pantheism. 
If all natural forces are merged in the one all-comprehending will of God, 
why should not the human will be merged in the will of God also? Why 
should not mind and matter alike be the phenomena of one force which has 
the attributes of both? Such a scheme makes supernatural religion impos- 
sible, for the reason that nature is denied, and everything — that is to say, 
nothing — becomes supernatural. How shall we save the sense of sin, if 
every sinful thought and impulse is the result of the divine efficiency? And, 
finally, how shall we save the character of God, if he is the direct author of 
moral evil ? 

It was such difficulties as these which led the main body of New England 
theologians to reject the exercise-system, with its attribution of all man's 
states and acts to the divine efficiency. But as they still followed Edwards 
in his rejection of substance or nature, the result was an almost unmitigated 
individualism. Smalley, Dwight and Woods were apparently conservative. 
N. W. Taylor best represents the tendencies of the system. He agreed with 
Hopkins and Emmons that there is no imputation of Adam's sin or of inborn 
depravity. He called that depravity physical, not moral. But he made all 
sin to be personal. He held to the power of contrary choice. Adam had 
it, and, contrary to the belief of Augustinians, he never lost it. Man "not 
only can if he will, but he can if he won't." He can, yet, without the 
Spirit, will not. Yet he did not hold to the Arminian liberty of indifference 
or contingence. He believed in the certainty of wrong action, yet in power 
to the contrary. "The error of Pelagius," he says, "was not in asserting 
that man can obey God without grace, but in saying that man does actually 
obey God without grace." t Dr. Park, of Andover, is understood to teach 
that the disordered state of the sensibilities and faculties with which we are 
born is the immediate occasion of sin, while Adam's transgression is the 
remote occasion of sin. The will, though influenced by an evil tendency, 
is still free ; the evil tendency itself is not free, and therefore is not sin. 
This doctrine, though less radical than that of Dr. Taylor, is notwithstand- 



* Hopkins, Works, 1 : 164-167. 
t Emmons, Works, 4 : 3S1. 
$ Moral Government, 2: 132. 



170 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

ing at a vast remove from that of Jonathan Edwards. Here Is no union of 
nature, or union of act, with Adam; no imputation of Adam's siu or of our 
hereditary depravity. On the whole, the history of New England theology 
shows a tendency to emphasize less and less the depraved tendencies prior 
to actual sin, and to maintain that moral character begins only with indi- 
vidual choice, — most of the New England theologians, however, holding that 
this individual choice begins at birth. 

If the reader has followed me thus far, he will be able to recognize in the 
New Theology many of the traits I have been describing, and to trace them 
to their sources. Nominalism treats human nature as a mere name. Ideal- 
ism regards substance as non-existent. The identity-system makes acts and 
exercises the be-all and end-all of our moral life. All these are features of 
an exaggerated individualism ; and of this, as I said at the beginning, 
the New Theology is the latest and most popular theological expression. 
That this is so will be more fully apparent, if I mention now certain of its 
more specific ideas. I propose to characterize them in each case by a catch- 
word, more or less descriptive. I do this mainly for the sake of clearness, 
and as a sort of mnemonic; I would therefore have the catch-word inter- 
preted by the following text, rather than have the text interpreted by the 
catch-word. 

The first specific idea of the new theology, then, is that of the Christian 
consciousness. The new method of thought, while not formally setting 
aside the Scriptures or assigning to them an inferior authority, sets side by 
side with them another standard of faith and practice, namely, the intuitions 
and experience of the believer. It connects itself very naturally with what 
we may call the illumination-theory of inspiration, which regards inspiration 
as merely an intensifying and elevating of the religious perceptions of the 
Christian, the same in kind, though greater in degree, with the illumination 
of every believer by the Holy Spirit ; and which holds, not that the Bible is, 
but that it contains the word of God — not the writings, but only the writers 
being inspired. Those who hold to this general form of doctrine, as they 
bring inspiration doicn to a lower level, would correspondingly bring illumi- 
nation up, so that both shall walk upon the same plane. It is the idealistic 
scheme of which we have already spoken. It depreciates the outward rev- 
elation, with the intent of exalting the inward. The spirit of scientific unity 
seems to constrain it; since there is undoubtedly something of the nature 
of inward revelation, all revelation must of necessity be inward. Christian 
consciousness becomes the only medium of receiving religious truth. The 
intuitions of the Christian are the final test. And so we have Christian 
preachers declaring that they will preach no doctrines which they have not 
realized in their own experience, and private Christians asserting that what 
they cannot understand they will not believe. Neither these preachers, nor 
these Christians, seem to perceive that they are acting upon the essential 
principle of rationalism, and that, so far as they act upon it. they are not 
believers at all. If I will accept nothing and preach nothing but what my 
reason can demonstrate and my intellect comprehend, why call myself a 
Christian? As Lessing said so well: "What is the use of a revelation that 
reveals nothing?" 

We get good from the Scriptures, only in proportion as we understand 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 171 

them. But we are not, for that reason, to keep back from men the Scrip- 
tures which we do not understand — others may understand the truth we 
speak, better than wc do. We have an objective message and communication 
from God, and this it is our business as ambassadors to deliver, whether 
men will hear, or whether they will forbear. The Old Testament prophets 
were not absolved from the duty of publishing God's word, although they 
themselves searched "what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ, 
which was in them, did point unto, when it testified beforehand the suffer- 
ings of Christ and the glories that should follow them." And New Testa- 
ment prophets are under equal obligation to "declare the whole counsel of 
God," in spite of their own personal ignorance of its full meaning. We get 
the good of truth only by understanding it, and we understand it only as 
the Holy Spirit takes of the things of Christ and shows them to us. Yet 
we are to accept the truth, and to publish the truth, whether we understand 
it or not. 

What, now, is the relation of Christian consciousness to the Scriptures? 
Or, to put the same question in different form : How far, and in what sense, 
are the experience and judgment of the Christian to be trusted, where 
Scripture is either ambiguous or silent? It seems to me that the very word 
"consciousness," which plays so important a part in this discussion, might 
teach a good lesson to the advocates of the New Theology. Consciousness, 
like conscience, is an accompanying knowledge. As those who would make 
conscience legislative, or would give to it original authority, are untrue to 
the meaning of the word itself, which intimates that conscience subsumes 
particular acts or states under a standard previously accepted from some 
other source, and judges them by or in connection with that standard, so 
consciousness is a con-knowing; in mental philosophy, a knowing of my 
own acts or states, in connection with my knowledge of self; in the matter 
we are discussing, a knowing of doctrine or duty, in connection with the 
permanent standard given us in Scripture. 

Consciousness is in no case a new or collateral source of truth. Experi- 
ence is only a testing or trying of truth already revealed. Intuition is not 
creative; it only recognizes objective realities that were already there to be 
recognized. And so all these words, loosely employed as they frequently 
are, should be kept to their primary meaning. The Christian consciousness 
is a con-knowing of the things of God, in connection with and by means of 
his written word. It is not a norma normans, but a norma normata; and 
this it must ever be, at least in our present state, for the reason that sin yet 
remains to blind us. The spiritual perception of the Christian is always 
rendered to some extent imperfect and deceptive by remaining depravity. 
"The ethico-religious consciousness" is by itself utterly untrustworthy; it 
must ever be rectified, as the judgments of conscience are to be rectified, by 
comparison with express divine revelation ; where revelation speaks, there 
Christian consciousness may safely speak; where that is silent, the latter 
must be silent: "To the law and to the testimony! If they speak not 
according to this word, surely there no no morning for them." 

Equally plain is it that nothing which we know of the work of the Holy 
Spirit warrants the attribution to the Christian consciousness of authority 
aside from or co-ordinate with that of Scripture. Despite the claims of 



172 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

advocates of "the inner light," from George Fox to the latest enthuiast, 11 
still remains true that the Holy Spirit works only by showing us the word ; 
the "sword" or instrument of the Spirit is "the word of God." The Holy 
Spirit takes of the "things of Christ." "brings them to remembrance," 
unfolds the truth "as it is in Jesus."* All this indicates not a new, but the 
revival of a past, revelation ; not the providing of a new reservoir, but dis- 
tribution from a reservoir already filled; not communication of new truth, 
but illumination of the mind to perceive the meaning of truth revealed 
already. So the Holy Spirit merely turns the outer word into an inner word, 
and makes its truth and power manifest to the heart. Any other doctrine 
than this is covert mysticism — new communications from God, aside from, 
or co-ordinate with, those embodied in the Scriptures. We can no more 
make theology without Scripture, than the Israelites in Egypt could make 
bricks without straw. 

The New Theology, in emphasizing the fact of the Holy Spirit's work 
within, is bringing into needed prominence a fact which has been too much 
neglected. Thus far I hope for good results from this movement of thought, 
and rejoice that the third person of the blessed Trinity is recognized as the 
author of all internal revelation. But all new movements in thought tend 
to extremes. I fear that the animating principle of the new movement is 
not so much zeal for the Holy Spirit's work as it is disinclination to recog- 
nize the outward revelation of God, which the Holy Spirit's work presup- 
poses ; and therefore that the tendency of it will be not so much to mysti- 
cism as to naturalism and rationalism. Let us ever remember that, as man 
can reveal himself by works and words, so can God. Internal revelation 
proceeds only upon the basis of external revelation ; it presupposes external 
revelation ; reflects, confirms, and establishes it. As the Holy Spirit is the 
organ of internal, so Christ is the organ of external revelation. We must 
not exaggerate the work of the Holy Spirit, for that is to depreciate the 
work of Christ. We must not overstate the internal evidence for Christian- 
ity, for that is to discredit miracles and the supernatural generally. We 
must not insist on the immanence of God, to the exclusion of the transcend- 
ence. And yet all these errors the New Theology is in danger of committing 
when it elevates Christian consciousness into a source, however subordinate, 
of Christian doctrine. The moment we exalt Christian experience into an 
authority, we undermine the Scriptures which constitute the only safe 
foundation for Christian experience. The logical result will sooner or later 
be the teaching that the only inspiration is Christian experience, and that 
all Christian experience is inspiration. We shall then cherish a thousand 
blind hopes for which revelation furnishes no solid basis; but with these 
hopes will come a thousand vagaries of doctrine, and finally both the vaga- 
ries and the hopes will be succeeded by the uncertainty, the unbelief, and 
the despair, into which an unbridled rationalism plunged the soul. 

There is a second specilic idea of the New Theology which I must now 
mention. It has to do with the person and work of the second person of 
t!-.e Trinity, as the last had to do with the persou and work of the third per- 
son of the Trinity. I know of no phrase that better expresses the idea than 
that of the extra-temporal Christ. Of course there is an antithesis intended 
here- The extra-temporal Christ is not the Christ of our earthly history, 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 173 

but the Christ who Is beyond present time and space; the eternal Logos 
who upholds all things, while at the same time he exists beyond them. 
Here, too, we must acknowledge that a great truth — a truth often ignored 
— is brought out and emphasized. Christ is "the Lamb slain from before 
the foundation of the world." "In him all things consist." He is "the 
same yesterday, and to-day, and forever." The whole physical universe is 
dependent upon Christ ; but it is equally true that the intellectual and moral 
world is dependent on him also; he is "the light that lighteth every man." 
Let us thank the New Theology for recalling theological thought to this 
truth. But with its inculcation of this truth there goes too often a tendency 
to forget that the historical manifestation of Christ is in the Scriptures 
declared to be the only ground of hope for sinners, and it is this tendency 
which we must criticise and reprehend. 

Let me make plain this objection to the New Theology. It substitutes an 
extra-temporal Christ for the Christ of historic fart, and bases its hopes 
rather upon Christ's ideal and essential nature than upon his actual mani- 
festation in humanity. In this I seem to see the influence of Schleiermacher. 
in whom idealism found its champion, and through whom idealism has 
infected the religious thinking of Germany. Schleiermacher had little con- 
fidence in Christianity as au external and historical fact; even the incarna- 
tion and resurrection of Christ, as literal events, he discredited, by calling 
them unnecessary to the vindication of our faith ; the Christ within seemed 
to him much more important than the Christ without ; Christian feelings 
and not outward facts were made to be the real sources of theology. Schlei- 
ermacher did noble service in bridging over the gulf between the old ration- 
alism and the new evangelical faith. He " builded better than he knew," 
when he declared that Christianity could rest its argument upon the facts of 
the inner life of the believer. But, as has been well said, he was another 
Lazarus ; he came forth with the grave-clothes of a pantheistic philosophy 
entangling his steps. He did not see that the loftier the structure of Chris- 
tian life and doctrine, the greater the need that its foundation be secure ; 
and that the authority of Christ as a teacher of supernatural truth rests upon 
his miracles, and specially upon the miracle of his resurrection. The inward 
wonders of the Christian life will not long impress men, if the historical 
facts of Jesus' incarnation and resurrection are denied. These inward won- 
ders, like the outward miracles, will be attributed to merely natural causes, 
and Christianity will be counted only the pleasing dream of the enthusiast. 

As with Jesus' life and teaching, so with his atonement ; the New Theology 
tends to substitute the inward for the outward. It has accepted very fully 
the idea that there is no principle in the divine nature that needs to be pro- 
pitiated. It is man, not God, who needs to be reconciled. The atonement 
is subjective, not objective. It has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but 
eo to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and lead them to repent- 
ance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to 
remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, 
but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. We see 
here again the nominalistic element. Righteousness in God is no distinct at- 
tribute; it is a mere name for benevolence. Hence Dr. Bushnell's view that 
an internal change in man himself is all that is needful ; hence Dr. Park's 



174 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

view that the cross is not an execution of justice, but only an exhibition of 
justice — a scenic representation of God's regard for law, which will make it 
safe for his government to pardon the violators of law. All this makes the 
atonement histrionic instead of real, converts it from an objective into a sub- 
jective fact, and transfers its place from the court of God's justice to the 
secret heart of the believer. In short, the theory exalts the Christ in us at 
the expense of the Christ outside of us, and does this in respect to the atone- 
ment just as much as it had previouslj' done in respect to revelation in gen- 
eral. 

There is an error here so subtle, and yet so fundamental, that we may do 
well carefully to consider it. It is the error of supposing that because out- 
ward revelation and atonement are limited by the conditions of space and 
time, they cannot have in them any infinite or absolute element, and there- 
fore we must look beyond them for something larger and more spiritual. It 
is of a piece wiih the mistake of Philip. Philip would have looked beyond 
the present historic Christ in order to find the Father. But Jesus' words 
were a sufficient correction of his error: "Have I been so long time with 
you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? lie that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father; how sayest thou, show us the Father?" Do we desire an 
ideal and spiritual Christ? We shall find him only in the crucified and 
risen Redeemer. In him is "all the fullness of the Godhead bodily," that 
is, in bodily form. The Christ of history divinely expresses the eternal 
Logos, nay, the very mind and heart of the whole Godhead; for "God was 
in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." The outward atonement has 
compressed into it the whole compass and meaning of redemption — God's 
love, in union with humanity, offering itself as a sacrifice to God's holiness, 
outraged by human sin. Human symbols only partially express the truth 
they are intended to convey ; divine symbols express the whole — nay, they 
are the truth and the fact itself, put into the forms of sense and time. Do 
we wish to know more about the meaning of the outward word? Then let 
us not add to it our human speculations; let us only study more closely 
what the word itself declares. Do we desire to know more about what 
Christ will do beyond this present earthly sphere? Then let us study auew 
his historical manifestation ; for the historical Christ is the extra-temporal 
Christ manifested. Eternity will only unfold the truth which we already 
possess in germ. As omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in 
every place, so, in the revelation of God in Christ which we have already, 
we possess the substance of God's eternal truth. 

The third and last specific idea of the New Theology may be characterized 
as that of a second probation. I am aware that the phrase will not be accepted 
by many of the advocates of the views I am examining, and I grant that it 
needs qualification. The probation for which they contend is not, they say, 
a second probation, since those who undergo it have never had, prior to that, 
any proper probation at all. It is not claimed that a future probation is 
enjoyed by all, but only that it is enjoyed by those who have had no oppor- 
tunity here to learn of the historic Christ. I must be allowed to say, how- 
ever, that the probation claimed is fairly called a second probation, if only 
those to whom it is granted are moral creatures here ; for a moral creature 
here, under only the providential government of God and with the mere 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 175 

light of conscience within, is being tested and tried in character. Whether 
this probation is a proper probation, is really the question at issue. The 
advocates of the New Theology declare that for multitudes it is not a proper 
probation. They say that for the heathen, as well as for infants, the oppor- 
tuuity to decide for or against Christ, since it is not given here, must be 
given hereafter. The immutable God must deal alike with all. Since Christ 
has died for all, all must have a chance to accept him as a Savior. For 
some at least, the work of the Holy Spirit must be done the other side of 
death. To some, Christ is offered as a Savior in the next world, rather 
than in this. 

I wish to point out first of all that this view is but a corollary of the noni- 
inalistic individualism, which I described in an earlier portion of this essay. 
The view rests upon an atomistic conception of the race as a mere collection 
of units. It can be successfully met, only by those who accept the Scriptu- 
ral doctrine of the organic unity of humanity and its common f.ill in Adam. 
New School theology cannot erect any sufficient barrier against it. It can- 
not find what ii regards as a fair and sufficient probation for each Individual 
since the first sin ; and the conclusion is easy, that there must be such a fair 
probation for each individual in the world to come. So New School theol- 
ogy inevitably becomes New Theology, and only illustrates the ultimate 
results of evil that flow from what at first seemed an unimportant deviation 
from Scriptural doctrine. Let us advise those who take this view to return 
to the old theology. Grant a fair probation for the whole race already 
passed, and the condition of mankind is no longer that of mere unfortunates 
unjustly circumstanced, but rather that of beings guilty and condemned, to 
whom present opportunity, and even present existence, is matter of pure 
grace, — much more the general provision of a salvation, and the offer of it 
to any human soul. To put my thought yet more clearly : This world is 
already a place of second probation ; and, since this second probation is due 
wholly to God's mercy, no probation after death is needed to vindicate eithei 
the justice or the goodness of God. Since one probation of the race was 
passed before our conscious experience began, since our present individual 
life is already a second probation and is wholly a matter of grace, it is pre 
sumption itself for any human being to demand in the future life still an- 
other and a third probation. 

But aside from a denial of a common probation and fall in our first father, 
which the New Theology involves, it commits the yet more palpable error of 
denying the universal guilt of mankind. I do not mean that this guilt is 
formally denied, but that it is so explained as to make it equivalent to mere 
misfortune or disease, and to absolve it from all obligation to suffer punish- 
ment. Of course no advocate of the New Theology is a believer in the guilt 
of inborn depravity. Denial of our oneness with Adam in the first trans- 
gression carries with it a denial of responsibility for the direct consequences 
of that transgression. Sin consists in sinning, says the New Theology; and 
by sinning it means only individual and personal transgression. The vast 
number of those who never in this world come to conscious moral life can 
have no sin or guilt to be atoned for ; they need no Christ, and, if they enter 
heaven at all, they enter it by right of native innocence. Sinful dispositions 
are sinful, not because they are sin, but because they lead to sin. And, 



176 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

since God takes into consideration the degree of light which men enjoy, 
those who in heathen lands are destitute of knowledge of the gospel are 
supposed to be in much the same condition as infants or idiots, and It is said 
of them that "where there is no law, there is no transgression." So our 
conviction of the guilt of the heathen is weakened, and it is held to be unjust 
in God to punish them, — at least until after they have heard of Christ and 
have consciously rejected him. 

Here is the weakness of Dorner's Eschatology, from which, as from an 
armory, many of the offensive weapons of the New Theology are drawn. 
Dorner began his great work on Christian doctrine with a just and profound 
view of sin, as unlikeness to God and self-determination of the will against 
him. But in the Eschatology this view is exchanged for another which 
practically ignores the element of guilt, and makes the sinner a more crea- 
ture, with just claims to God's pity. All this falls in with the pantheistic 
tendency of our time to regard sin as a natural necessity, instead of being 
as it is, the wilful revolt of the free will from God. I-et us take our stand 
upon that law of God which is a reflection of his holiness and is identical 
with the constituent principles of being; that law which demands absolute 
perfection in thought, desire, word, deed, aye, even in the very substance 
of the soul; that law which declares all falling short of this standard as sin 
and guilt, deserving not pardon but punishment. The heathen can claim 
nothing from God; the Scripture expressly declares that they are "by nature 
children of wrath." God is under no obligation to them. They are guilty 
by birth, and guilty by overt transgression. Not one of them has a claim 
to grace in this present world ; much less has he a claim to grace in the 
world to come. Does the New Theology believe that the heathen are guilty? 
if so, let it cease to argue that the justice of God requires that they should 
have a chance to accept salvation, either here or hereafter. 

The fact that Christ, as eternal Logos, exists beyond the bounds of his 
historic work is often urged to break the force of this argument from the 
guilt of the heathen. But let us remember that this manifestation of Christ 
is granted to the heathen even here and now. As he is "the light that 
lighteth every man," all natural conscience and all religious ideas, so far as 
they have truth in them, are derived from him. Before his advent in the 
flesh, patriarchs were saved by believing in him, and the antediluvian world 
was condemned for rejecting him ; for, whether in believing or rejecting, 
they had to do with him who is the only revealer of God, of whom, and 
through whom, are all things. God did not even then leave himself, he 
does not now leave himself, without a witness. The heathen are without 
excuse, because "that which is known of God is manifest among them." 
Missionaries find everywhere the knowledge of law ; there is a universal 
sense of sin ; every man in some way violates conscience, and feels justly 
condemned. The New Theology speaks of a supra-historic Christ, and 
prides itself on emphasizing his inward work in human hearts. Let it rec- 
ognize the fact that Christ is already doing a supra-historic work ; that the 
revelation of nature is itself a revelation of Christ ; that men do not need to 
see the cross on which he died, in order to reject him. In short, in this 
great controversy between God and the sinning children of men, let us put 
ourselves upon the side of God and not upon the side of his enemies. Let 
us declare God to be true, though we have to call every man a liar. 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 177 

If men may accept Christ or reject him without knowing of his his- 
torical manifestation in the flesh, what limits can we put to his work of 
mercy? We put no limits but those which his word declares. The patri- 
archs, though they had no knowledge of a personal Christ, were saved by 
believing in God so far as God had revealed himself to them ; and whoever 
among the heathen are saved must in like manner be saved by casting them- 
selves as helpless sinners upon God's plan of mercy, dimly shadowed forth 
in nature and providence. But such faith, even among the patriarchs and 
heathen, is implicitly a faith in Christ, and would become explicit and con- 
scious trust and submission, whenever the historic Christ were made known 
to them. Christ is the word of God and the truth of God; he may there- 
fore be received even by those who have not heard of his manifestation 
in the flesh; we may hope that "many shall come from the east and the 
west, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom 
of heaven." For "God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation be 
that feareth him and worketh righteousness is acceptable to him." A proud 
and self-righteous morality is inconsistent with salvation ; but a penitent 
and humble reliance upon God as a Savior from sin and a snide of conduct 
is an implicit faith in Christ ; for such reliance casts itself upon God so far 
as God has revealed himself, and the only revoalor of God is Christ. But 
as the Scriptures intimate that men may be saved by an implicit trust in 
Christ, so they equally intimate that men may be lost by only implicitly 
rejecting him. As men can be saved by casting themselves as sinners upon 
the mercy of a Christ whose very name they do not know, so they can be 
lost by transgressing the law and resisting the drawings of that same Christ 
who speaks to them only in nature, in conscience, and in providence. How 
long his Spirit will strive with man, and when the day of his grace shall 
end, reason cannot inform us ; the objective word is the only source of knowl- 
edge. Since his atonement is a matter of grace, not of justice, it can be ap- 
plied when and where he pleases. Only he can tell us upon what terms, and 
for how long, men can obtain salvation. And what saith the Scripture? Does 
it hold out the hope that after death, for the heathen or for any others, there 
may still be opportunities of faith and pardon ? On the other hand, we have 
the declarations that "they that sin without law shall perish without law;" 
we shall all be "manifest before the judgment seat of Christ" — not that each 
may have new opportunity for salvation, but "that each may receive the 
things done in the body." Of the wicked, it is said that their "end is to be 
burned." "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this," not a new 
probation, but "judgment." In the next world, between the righteous and 
the wicked there is "a great gulf fixed," impassable to both. "They that 
have done ill" shall come forth from their graves, not to undergo a new pro- 
bation, but "unto the resurrection of judgment." All these Scripture pas- 
sages indicate finality in the decisions of this present life ; and for this rea- 
son Protestant churches have never thought it right to pray for the dead. 
We know that conversion and renewal are the work of the Holy Spirit; but 
we have no Scripture evidence that the influences of the Spirit are exerted, 
after death, upon the still impenitent ; there is abundant evidence, on the 
contrary, that the moral condition in which death finds men is their condl 
tion forever. 
12 



178 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

I began my article by calling the New Theology a theology of exaggerated 
individualism. I have spoken of its historical connections, and have traced 
it back to nominalism, idealism, and the identity-system of Jonathan Ed- 
wards. I have noted and criticized the most prominent specific ideas of 
the New Theology, namely, the Christian consciousness, the extra-temporal 
Christ, and the future probation of those who have not in this life had the 
gospel preached to them. But there are certain practical results to be appre- 
hended from this tendency in the theological world, which, as the applica- 
tion of my subject, I feel compelled, finally, though very summarily, to 
mention. The theology of exaggerated individualism, will, in my judgment, 
do much to accelerate that deterioration of family life which has often b^cn 
pointed out as a sign that Christianity is losing its hold upon the nation. 
The individualistic theory of the family is an outgrowth of the individual- 
istic theory of the race. To great masses of our population marriage is but 
a civil contract, which, so far as the mere right of the thing is concerned, is 
dissoluble at pleasure. After marriage, as before marriage, the parties are 
two, not one; the merging of the two into each other, the constitution of a 
new organic unity — in short, the very idea of the family bond — is absent; 
the individual is still a law unto himself, instead of being under law to 
another. Hence the frequent discord which invades the family, and the 
increasing prevalence of divorce. The same exaggerated individualism 
appears in the labor-strifes of our day. Every man is for himself, whether 
he be capitalist or workman. Each thinks of his rights, but thinks much 
less of his duties. The idea of the organic unity of society, of merging per- 
sonal interests in the interests of the whole, of thinking not simply of his 
own things but of the things of others also, this idea is fast dying out. We 
need to revive and reinforce it by the inculcation of human unity and broth- 
erhood. The Scripture furnishes us with our doctrine. The family is one; 
society is one ; the nation is one ; the race is one. Because one blood flows 
in our veins and we have one divine Father, we are members one of another. 

In the life of the church this principle is more important still, and forget- 
fulnness of it brings results yet more pernicious. There is a vital union with 
the Redeemer which joins all Christians to one another. In connecting 
themselves with Christ they become members of a mighty organism per- 
vaded with the common life of the Head. In a true sense the Christian 
ceases to be an individual, and merges himself in the body ; he can say : 
"For me to live is Christ;" "no longer live I, but Christ liveth in me." 
And yet how plain it is, that to many Christians there never yet has come 
this sense of the real meaning of their relation to Christ, and to his body, the 
church. An exaggerated individualism yet rules them. They have no con- 
ception of the church as an organism which derives its life from Christ, a 
living unity into which they have merged themselves. They have no sense 
of the dignity of their position, as belonging to Christ's body, or as respon- 
sible for the condition of the whole. "Am I my brother's keeper?" is still 
their cry. Surely nothing is so much needed in our church-life as the sub- 
stitution of the instinct of unity for the spirit of isolation and division. 
And what better recipe can be given than the inculcation of the Scripture 
doctrine of union with Christ? But that doctrine cannot be taken by itself. 
Side by side with it is the other doctrine of anion with Adam. As justifica- 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 179 

tion comes to all who receive their spiritual life from Christ, so condemna- 
tion conies to all who receive their natural life from Adam. And so the 
highest conception of the Christian life, and the highest efficiency of the 
Christian church, are inseparably bound up with the acceptance of the old 
doctrine of the organic unity of the race and its common fall in the person 
of its first father. 

This subject has a special relation to the ministry and to missions. It has 
been felt of late that there was a great falling off in the number of recruits ; 
that the disposition to enter the ministry was waning; that there was no suf- 
ficient impulse to prosecute the work. I venture to suggest a reason for 
this. Christian people are losing out of their thoughts the idea of oneness 
with the race; and young men are no longer pressed with the conviction that, 
as a part of this common humanity, they are bound to do all they can to save 
it. We are bound to love our neighbor as ourselves, because our neighbor 
is ourselves. It was because Christ was one with us that he was hound to die. 
In order to revive the sense of obligation to preach the gospel, we need first 
to inculcate the organic unity of the race. And what is true of ministers 's 
true of the church at larsre. The only sufficient incentive to missionary 
effort is that sense of unity which Christ's teaching and example are calcu- 
lated to inspire. All that separates the heathen from us, or makes their fate 
dependent upon the decisions of another world, is a hindrance to missions. 
We must feel ourselves the brothers of all, and we must feel that their fate 
is in our hands, if we are ever to put forth the effort necessary to their con- 
version. Only upon the view that Paul regarded the heathen as lost if they 
did not in this life learn of Christ and accept him, can we explain his con- 
suming missionary zeal. Only upon the view that "the heathen perish day 
by day," can we explain the communication of Paul's spirit to the mission- 
aries of modern times. If the salvation of the heathen practically depends 
upon the prayers and gifts and labors of the church, we may hope yet to see 
Christendom pouring into heathen lands its men and its treasure, in order to 
bring the nations to the faith of Jesus Christ. But if the heathen are not 
shut up to this life as their only time of mercy, if a vast future of larger 
opportunity opens to them beyond death, not only will the Christian world 
cease to feel their guilt, but it will cease to feel their danger. "The nerve 
of missionary enterprise will be cut," and the day of Christ's triumph will 
be postponed, until there rises a new generation with deeper convictions of 
the sinfulness of sin, and with deeper compassion for the millions that yearly 
perish for lack of knowledge. 

The New Theology exaggerates the principle of individualism, and thinks 
that it gains thereby a nobler view of man. But it looks only at the individ- 
ual man ; of humanity as a whole, fallen in Adam and sunk in a common 
guilt, it has no conception ; hence it can never rise to the sublime concep- 
tion of a common redemption in Christ and of the common dependence of 
the race upon the one historical Savior. It needs the idea of man as man, to 
lift it out of doctrinal inconsistency and practical inefficiency. Not only 
theoretical considerations but observed effects argue that the well-worn path 
is the path of safety — via trita, via tut a. We have no need of the New 
Theology, for the old is better. 



XIII. 
THE LIVING GOD/ 



Many of you have been struck with the frequent recurrence In Scripture 
of the phrase "the living God." If you look carefully you will find this 
designation in all parts of the Bible, from the Pentateuch, where Israel is 
said to have "heard the voice of the living God" speaking from Mount Sinai, 
to the Revelation, where the flying angel is said to 'have the seal of the 
living God," and God is spoken of as "he that sitteth upon the throne, who 
liveth forever and ever." This recognition of God as "the living God" is 
combined with the mention of all his other attributes and works, and these 
acquire new lustre from the association, while they in turn reflect light upon 
the meaning of the phrase with which they are combined. The text explains 
what I mean. There the fact that God is the one only and true God, and 
that he exercises from everlasting to everlasting the attributes of kingship, 
shows that the life of God is an all-originating and all-controlling life, shows 
in fine that it is life in the highest sense. We need not wonder at finding 
this lofty view of the divine Being so plainly declared, nor at finding the 
conception of God as the living God underlying the whole Scripture. The 
very purpose for which the Hebrew nation existed was to root deeply in 
human consciousness this idea of the one living and true God. And how 
deeply it was rooted is shown by the fact that among the Jews all natural 
forces came to be looked upon as directly under God's hand, and as mani- 
festing his will, so that the Psalmist, in his description of the storm, leaves 
out all mention of secondary causes, and says in so many words, "The God 
of glory thundereth." So completely were the apostles delivered from all 
conception of God as a dead abstraction, or as capable of a rival, that they 
almost by instinct besought the worshippers of idols to "turn from these 
vanities unto the living God." If we have in any degree lost sight of this 
truth, we need to get back to it, for a mistake here will vitiate our whole 
view of Christian doctrine, and may work incalculable injury in our actual 
lives. Let us first inquire what it means to say that God is the living God, 
and secondly, what this conception of God involves by way of consequence. 

First, the meaning of it : Life, in God, must mean much more than it 
does in man — must mean nothing less than an all-originating and all-x'is- 
taining life. Man, in a sense, has life and gives life; but he knows that what 
life he has is not originated by himself, but has come to him apart from his 
own knowledge or will. His reason compels him to infer the existence of 
another life from which his own originally sprang. He knows that he does 
not sustain his own life from day to day. The machinery of his frame works 



* Originally prepared as a sermon upon the text, Jer. 10: 10 — "The Lord 
is the true God; he is the living God, and an everlasting king." 

180 



THE LIVING GOD. 181 

on even in his sleep, — some other life keeps all things moving. Indeed, all 
the life of nature, not originating itself, and not able to account for itself, 
must be referred back to some higher life that originates and preserves it. 
And this life in which all other life is grounded, great as it is, and beyond 
all our efforts to comprehend it, belongs to God. Our first conception of him 
is that of one who not only has life, but who has it in overflowing fullness, 
so that he is the source and principle of all other life which the universe com- 
tains. This is the main thought of the 104th Psalm. With a little altera- 
tion, I may use the following words of a noted interpreter: "You find there, 
more than in any other ancient poetry, the distinct recognition of the abso- 
lute dependence of the universe, as created, upon the Creator. ' He is before 
all things, and by him all things subsist.' But this is not all. God's work 
is not regarded as a thing of the past merely, — the universe is not a machine 
once set going and then left to its fate or to inexorable laws. The great 
Worker is ever working. The world and all things owe not only their origin 
but their present form to the operation of God. He who made, renews, the 
face of the earth. It is the same profound view of the relation of the cos- 
mos to the Creator which Paul exhibits in his speech on Mars Hill. He 
too is careful not to separate the past from the present. God, who made the 
world in the past, did not leave the work of his fingers : the streaming forth 
of his omnipotence and love was not checked or stayed ; on the contrary, 
every part of his creation rests at every moment on his hands, 'seeing he 
giveth' continually, 'to all, life and breath and all things.' " God then is 
the living God, as being the soul which animates a universe that would be 
dead without him. 

And yet some who have maintained this truth most earnestly, have declared 
that this principle of universal life is itself unintelligent and unconscious, 
and that the great life of the universe comes to consciousness only in indi- 
viduals, whether of this or other races. In opposition to this the Scriptures 
maintain again that this life of God is a life of the spirit, conscious, intelli- 
gent, self-determining, free; acting in infinite wisdom for infinitely worthy 
ends ; and displaying in all its acts the glory of a perfect character — a char- 
acter of holiness and love. If we do not admit this to be a true representa- 
tion of God, we put God below man — the Creator below the creature. Indeed 
we cannot account for man at all, or for the wonderful adaptations of the 
universe. There are marks of intelligent design everywhere. Means are 
fitted to ends. The God who so fitted and adapted one part of his creation 
to another must be a God of intelligence and purpose and benevolent impulse. 
There must be a thinking and willing above us, separate from the thinking 
and willing of the creature, — or else the creature could never have been made 
to think and will. Nothing can produce what is above itself, — the offspring 
of the beast is only a beast, not a man. All the universe, if there were no 
life in it but that of blind natural forces, could not produce anything that 
was not blind and unintelligent like itself. But man on the other hand, 
being gifted with the power of thought and will, instinctively reasons that 
the power that gave him being must think and will also ; otherwise there is 
no adequate cause for his existence. And David puts the argument in poetic 
yet unanswerable form when he asks: "He that planted the ear, shall he 
not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? He that teacheth 
man knowledge, shall not he know?" 



182 THE LIVING GOD. 

And so our reason drives us to the belief in God as a personal Being — 
distinct from bis works and exalted above his works, even while he is mov- 
ing all the wheels of his great system. And, as man's personality implies a 
conscious intelligence, a self-determining will, a character, an end, so apply- 
ing these same ideas to God, when raised to their highest power, we see 
in God a consciousness that embraces at the same moment all things in the 
universe and in himself ; a will that ordains either directly or by permission 
all existences and events ; a character that makes every thought and deter- 
mination infinitely benevolent and holy; an end in creation and in his own 
existence infinitely worthy of himself. But what is the deepest and most 
central idea of this personal life? I answer, it is the idea of will — will 
exercised in all things in infinite freedom and infinite power. Ask yourself 
what it is that most contributes to make you a living soul, and you find it is 
your freedom, your power under certain limitations to become an originating 
cause. If man were a mere machine, moved by forces entirely external to 
himself, he would not be man, — he would not call himself alive. But this 
will within us, which forms decisions, chooses e^ds, leaps forward towards 
the objects of its choice, and guides all the enginery of the nature onward 
with it to the goal, this our great heritage, this gives us all the substantial 
existence we have, this constitutes our dignity in the creation. The plant 
or the brute acts only as it is acted upon ; It chooses no end for which to 
work ; it has no spontaneity of life. But man stands nearest God by virtue 
of this faculty which in a certain sense creates, bringing forth new thoughts, 
desires, and acts, and exerting a force which is felt in its last vibrations 
in every part of the universe and by God himself. 

And yet, as I just said, man exerts this living force only under limitations. 
External circumstances confine him. His own nature binds him. How he 
came to be what he is, he does not know; and he can alter himself as little 
as he can make over again the outward world. And so this will-power which 
man exerts, and which constitutes the essence of his life, only feebly reflects 
the energy of will that exists in God. What must this will be, that consti- 
tutes the central principle of God's personality — that makes him in deed 
and in truth the living God? You can see at once that his will has no ex- 
ternal restrictions. "None can stay his hand, and say 'what docst thou?' " 
You can see that, will being essential to his personality, he does nothing 
without a will — no blind action — no unconscious action like that of our 
sleep and our dreams, but wherever God works through the universe — and 
he works everywhere — he works in all his personality, works as a living, 
conscious, moral agent, works with perfect freedom the present decrees of 
an infinite will. 

It must be remembered, too, that as the life of God is a self-existent life, 
so it is sufficient to itself. God does not need the universe, nor any creature, 
to supplement his existence or render him more happy. Pie is the ever- 
blessed God because, independently of the things he has made, he possesses 
infinite resources of knowledge and communion and joy in his own holy 
nature. And these are secured to God forever by the fact that in his nature 
there are distinctions which are revealed to us under the figure of persons. 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Before the world was, these existed, so that 
God in himself had objects of contemplation and of love from eternity — ■ 



THE LIVING GOD. 183 

objects infinitely surpassing his after creation, in magnificence and glory. 
God is the living God, because his life is an absolutely independent and 
self-sufficient life. And so all his acts and forth-puttings of power, whether 
in creation or in providence or in redemption, are free acts, dictated not by 
necessity but by pure disinterested love. Any other conception than this 
denies In effect that he is the living God. If there be anything in him 
which compels him to create or to reveal himself, then he ceases to be free. 
And the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is the most rational of all doctrines, 
because only by it can the independence of God, or in other words his God- 
hood, be maintained. The Unitarian view of the absolute simplicity of the 
divine nature leaves God without an object, without love, without com- 
munion, unless he finds it in the world. Eternity past, on this theory, must 
be an eternity of desolation ; and, to escape this conclusion, many a Unitari- 
an thinker is driven to believe in the eternity of matter and so to put side by 
side with God an eternal something which he did not originate, and which 
determines and limits him. This is to destroy his Deity altogether. And 
the only refuge from this is the Pantheistic conception of God and nature 
as one, and of an unintelligent, half -material God that comes to life and 
consciousness only in individual minds. And, that Unitarianism tends to 
Pantheism and the denial of all real life in God, is abundantly shown by the 
history of Mohammedanism and modern Judaism on the one hand, and on 
the other by the rapid downward progress of New England thought from 
the cautious Unitarianism of Channing to the half-fledged Pantheism of 
Theodore Parker and the full-fledged Pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
How much better than all this, how much more rational and how much 
more safe the Scriptural view of a trinity of persons in the divine nature — 
a view which maintains the absolute perfection of God by declaring his 
eternal independence and self-sufficiency — a view which recognizes in 
him a fullness of resources that needs no creature and no universe to 
render it more complete, that provides eternal and infinite objects of con- 
templation and the means of perfect love and fellowship without going 
outside of his own nature, and that shows how the eternal existence of these 
objects of regard can never hamper or limit him, because they are not created 
objects, but the Son and the Holy Ghost, the equal partakers of his essence 
and the sharers of his throne. 

Thus, I have attempted to explain the meaning of the phrase "the living 
God," and have shown that it involves the ideas, first, of an all-originating 
and sustaining life, in opposition to the views of the Deist who would ban- 
ish God from the universe he has made and set a-going; secondly, of a 
consciously voluntary life, in opposition to the views of the Pantheist who 
would entomb God in the great machine and counfound him with it; thirdly, 
of an eternally independent and self -sufficient life, in opposition to the 
views of the Unitarian, w r ho would deny the distinction of persons in the 
Godhead and logically destroy his Deity by making him dependent upon 
his creation. If you have followed me thus far, you will appreciate two most 
important and valuable results which flow from this conception of God as 
the living God. And the first is, that it utterly delivers us from the tyranny 
of the modern idea of law, which so weakens the faith and oppresses the 
hearts of many believers. I say the tyranny of the modern idea of law, 



184 THE LIVING GOD. 

and by this I mean the overstraining of the idea so that it encompasses and 
swallows up all things — the universe, freedom, and God himself. How 
many there are who begin to doubt whether the dominion of fixed law leaves 
any room for miracles, for answers to prayer, for pardoning grace, for regen- 
erating power ! Now I think it is easy to see, after what has been said, that 
these doubts all rest upon a mistaken notion of the nature of law and of its 
relation to God. Far be it from me to decry the true idea of "the reign of 
law" which constitutes the strength and inspiration of modern science. I 
stand for it. I rejoice in it as almost a new revelation of the perfections of 
God himself. But on that very account I am unwilling to sacrifice that 
which is its greatest glor3 r — its connection with the unseen worker who 
manifests himself through it. To deify law, and put it in place of God, — 
that is to unmake it, to destroy it. To imagine some blind, unconscious 
force shaping all things into forms of beauty and regulating all the changes 
of nature and of history, — that is to put ourselves under the awful sceptre 
of fate, and to turn law into a hideous monstrosity. And from this concep- 
tion, the revelation of God as the living God delivers us. If he is the 
all-originating, all-sustaining, all-controlling One, and no force is exerted 
in the universe without his permission and superintendence, then law 
assumes a different aspect to us. The laws of nature and the laws of the 
Spirit are all manifestations of the harmony of his nature and the power of 
his will. His laws are fixed because his will is infinitely wise and so infinite- 
ly unchanging, — and the regular sequences of nature are but the orderly 
methods of his operation. What is law? Can you give any better definition 
of it than this — a steady will enforced by power? Can you define the 
phrase "laws of nature" any better than by saying that they are the mani- 
festations of a present God, enforcing an infinitely wise and changeless will 
by the exercise of infinite power? See then how all these laws which we 
are tempted to look. upon as dead material things are revelations of a per- 
sonal will, a present upholder and mover, in other words, a living God ! 
However closely these laws may press me or cross me, there is an infinite 
personality in them. God in all the rectitude and benevolence of his char- 
acter is present in them, not suffering them to bring wrong or harm to his 
creatures, but making all things in the universe "work together for good to 
them that love him." 

This conception of God as the living God delivers us from the tyranny of 
the idea of law, moreover, by showing us that God is not confined to the 
domain of nature's laws, but while he is in them, is also above them, making 
them serve him. You know how man uses the laws of nature and makes 
them serve him. As he did not originate them, so he cannot destroy them 
or dispense with them. If he thinks to override one of them, like the law 
of gravitation, he comes down with broken bones. But it is wonderful how 
he can combine them to produce new effects which nature never would have 
produced of herself. By making use of the expansion of steam and combin- 
ing this with other known mechancial laws, he can bring in a force which 
shall counteract the law of gravitation and can lift himself in an elevator 
from the bottom to the top of a building without breaking his bones at all. 
And the chemist can so combine the forces of nature as to produce ice in a 
red-hot crucible. So man, limited as he is, is yet above nature, and by 



THE LIVING GOD. 185 

combining -j ''ire's laws in now ways can make them serve his purposes. 
And now, if man can do this, has the living God less power than man? 
Cannot Lie combine the laws of nature in unseen ways to accomplish his 
plans and to answer the prayers of his people? >>'ay, cannot he do more 
than this, namely, exercise an absolute spontaneity and freedom by making 
new beginnings in history without any reference to natural law at all? It 
is the glory of man that his will is in part an originating force, not wholly 
determined by the antecedents of his situation, but capable of new decisions 
unconnected with his former life and for which no laws of nature can account. 
And cannot God in like manner exercise his infinite freedom of will, insert- 
ing a new and personal force into nature, and thus working miracles of 
healing and resurrection and renewing of the soul? Oh, yes! Our God is 
not a dead God, but a living God. Law is not an exhaustive expression of 
his will. After law has uttered its last word, there is still room for another 
and more glorious manifestation of God in the merciful, helpful, pardoning, 
restoring aspects of his character — and that manifestation we will call grace. 
Nature is the loose mantle in which he commonly reveals himself ; but he is 
not fettered by the robe he wears — he can thrust it aside when he will and 
•'make bare his arm" in providential interpositions for earthly deliverauce, 
and in mighty movements within the bounds of history for the salvation of 
the sinner and for the setting up of his kingdom. 

The other benefit which results to us from this conception of God as the 
living God, is the new vividuess and reality which it gives to all God's deal- 
ings with our individual souls. So all-pervasive is the false conception of 
law of which I have spoken, that many Christians have come to think of 
God's moral attributes and doings as conditioned by it. They have come 
to expect more from natural causes in their own experience and in the 
progress of religion in the world than they expect from God. Their God 
is a God in fetters — a God confined and constrained, not only by the laws 
of his own creation, but by the laws of his own being. And so holiness and 
love and grace have come to be abstractions to them, and they have "limited 
the holy One of Israel." I fear, indeed, that in much of our modern preach- 
ing this idea has insensibly exerted far too great an influence. Even God's 
moral law has put on the semblance of a mere law of nature, in which the 
personality and living will of God is lost sight of. Sin is conceived of as 
misfortune and weakness, like the misstep that breaks the limb on a dark 
night, instead of the transgression of command and the opposition to God 
which the guilty conscience declares it to be. A merely subjective atone- 
ment that will repair the injury done to itself by the individual soul is said 
to be all-sufficient, while the offended personality of God and the necessity 
of satisfaction to his outraged holiness are forgotten. 

And the punishment of the sinner for rejecting the atonement is made to 
consist only in the reaction of natural law, instead of consisting also in the 
just retribution and wrath which a personal God who hates all sin visits upon 
him who persists in ungodliness and tramples under his feet the blood of 
Jesus. In fine, a materializing, semi-pantheistic conception of law has risen 
like a vapor from the lower levels of physical research, and has enshrouded 
every one of the mountainous truths of revelation that used to stand out so 
(dear in sunlight, till the life and glory of them is all gone. Do you know 



186 THE LIVING GOD. 

the reason? The sunlight that once gave them splendor and beauty wa3 
the light that shone from the face of a personal and living God, and when 
the sun sets, the mountains must be dark ! 

But this conception of God as the living God gives us back our faith. 
Divine holiness Is no abstraction now, but a living attribute of God, pene- 
trated through and through with the energy and activity of will. Moral 
law comes now to be the manifestation, not simply of what God is, but of 
what he wills and demauds. Obedience is recommended now not simply by 
our needs but by the authority of God — it is not only the best policy 
of the soul to yield itself to him, but it is his boundeu duty — and 
disobedience is enmity against the law giver. Now we need an atonement, 
not only to reconcile us to God, but to reconcile God to us. Now we need 
a forgiveness which shall bring us as guilty sinners into communion once 
more with a personal God. And how wonderfully personal on this better 
view does grace become ; not simply the remanding us to some new work- 
ing of law, by which all shall be made of us that naturally can be, but the 
free, unbought extension to us of God's will and purpose of redemption, 
restoring us to his favor and making us sous of God ! So in redemption, as 
in creation and providence, we recognize the relation of a personal God to 
our souls, putting into every act and effort of his love the warmth and direct- 
ness of an infinite, divine affection. So we come into a fellowship with Gorl 
which would have been utterly impossible if God had been only another 
name to us for law. We find one who, "in opposition to all dead abstrac- 
tions, all vague head-notions, is the living Person, the source and fountain 
of all life, loving and loved in return." It was this for which the Psalmist 
longed when he cried: "As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so 
panteth my soul after thee, O God ! My soul thirsteth for God, for the liv- 
ing God. When shall I come and appear before God?" "What we want," 
says Robertson, "is not infinitude, but a boundless One; not to feel that 
love is the law of this universe, but to feel One whose name is Love. For 
else, if in this world of order there be no one in whose bosom that order is 
centred, and of whose being it is the expression: in this world of manifold 
contrivance, no personal affection which gave to the skies their trembling 
tenderness, and to the snow its purity ; then order, affection, contrivance, 
wisdom, are only horrible abstractions, and we are in the dreary universe 
alone. It is a dark moment when the sense of that personality Is lost : more 
terrible than the doubt of immortality. For, of the two, eternity without a 
personal God, or God for seventy years without immortality, no one after 
David's heart would hesitate. ' Give me God for life, to know and be known 
by Him ! No thought is more hideous than that of an eternity without 
Him.'" 

And yet I do not know that we should ever be convinced of this, if God 
had not shown his will and power in the incarnation. The greatest proof of 
will and power is self -limitation; and the self -limitation of God in the person 
of Christ, the voluntary resigning of his glory, the narrowing of himself to 
our human conditions, and the taking upon him of our burdens of guilt and 
penalty, these show personality as nothing else could. Not will alone, but 
heart also, must go to the making of a man. So he in whose image we are 
made shows most that he is the living God by the exhibition of his love in 



THE LIVING GOD. 



187 



the cross. For "God was In Christ, reconciling the world uuto himself;" 
and, as Jesus himself said: "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 
If we have ever thought that God was a dead God, identical with the wheels 
and processes of nature ; if we have ever thought of him as only a thinking 
mechanism, a God of more Idea and Reason, as cold and emotionless as the 
white clouds above our heads or the snow beneath our feet ; if we have ever 
thought of him as mere force or arbitrary will, without care for the crea- 
tures who sin and who suffer; let our eyes be opened to see the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. There we see 
that God has heart as well as mind and will, that his nature is tremblingly 
sensitive to our human griefs and needs, that he has an eye to pity and an 
arm to save. The living Christ, in whom God manifests himself as the Way, 
the Truth and the Life, is the final and conclusive proof that God is the liv- 
ing God. 

There are two Scripture sentences which I would leave with you in con- 
clusion. They suggest more than a thousand admonitions or invitations 
could. They are both found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the one 
rounds as if addressed to the children of God, the other as if addressed to 
those who know not God. The first is this: "Ye are come unto Mount 
Zion, and unto the city of the living God." It suggests the glorious heritage 
of the Christian with whom God has entered into relations of personal 
friendship and communion, and the infinite possibilities that lie before him 
in that future city which the boundless freedom and the inventive mind of 
God shall fill with wonders of blessing and glory to those who love him. 
The other text suggests the boundless possibilities of misery and shame and 
condemnation that lie before the unrepenting sinner, when once he shall see 
face to face that infinite Being whom he has made his enemy. Pouder this 
text, O sinner: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living 
God." 



XIV. 
THE HOLINESS OF GOD/ 



Have you ever come to the very verge of death, and then been suddenly 
and unexpectedly delivered? If you have not, there are some lessons that 
you have yet to learn. Such times of rescue are full of instruction. The 
veil that hides the supernatural from us seems withdrawn. God fills the 
whole horizon of our thought. We cease to regard him as a dream of the 
fancy or as an appendage of our comfort. We see him as he is — the per- 
sonal and living God, the centre and stay of all things, the only eternal 
reality. In such hours, too, the conscience speaks, and, in the hush of 
earthly passion and selfishness, we perceive those moral attributes which 
chiefly make God to be God. 

It was such a rescue from imminent destruction that occasioned the utter- 
ance of the text. It is part of the song which the saved people of Israel 
sang on the shore of the Red Sea, after that fearful night in which Pharaoh 
and his host had perished. They looked back upon the waters through 
which they had passed in safety, but in which their enemies had been over- 
whelmed, and depths of God's nature seemed opened to their view that were 
deeper than the depths of the sea. There was an attribute of God which 
had never been mentioned in previous revelations, never before had been 
put into a single word and so expressed to men, but which stood out clear and 
bright forever from the day that Moses and the children of Israel sang unto 
the Lord: "Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods! who is like 
unto thee, glorious in holiness ! " 

That song, in which the holiness of God was the culminating theme, was 
not merely the natural expression of a new-born nation's gratitude and wor- 
ship — it was an inspired song also. And the witness of inspiration to God's 
holiness has never ceased. Beginning here in the Pentateuch it goes on, in 
an ever-broadening and deepening stream, until we reach the book of Reve- 
lation. Throughout the Bible, holiness is the attribute insisted on more 
than any other. Do you say that this is only because in man's state of sin, 
his first and most pressing need is to be convinced that God is holy? But 
in heaven there is no sin, yet in heaven cherubim and seraphim continually 
do cry: "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty!" Do you say that this 
prominence is given to holiness only because the revelation of it is adapted 
to our present stage of progress and capacity? But look beyond the pres- 
ent ; see the eternal future portrayed in the Apocalypse ; hear the host of 



* Originally prepared as a sermon on the text, Ex. 15: 11 — "Glorious in 
holiness," and preached in the Chapel of the University of Rochester, on 
the Day of Prayer for Colleges, January 31. 1878; subsequently printed as 
an article in the Examiner, January 26. February 9, and February 22, 1SS2. 

1SS 



THE HOLINESS OF GOD. 189 

the redeemed upon the shores of another sea, in which the last of God's foes 
has been overthrown; there they sing again: "Who shall not fear thee, O 
Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy!" 

Since the greatest thought of the finite is the infinite, and our ruling con- 
ception of God must make or mar our earthly career and settle our eternal 
destiny, how important a thing it is that we should have worthy thoughts of 
the divine holiness! May the Spirit of holiness enlighten us while we inquire 
what holiness in God is, how it is distinguished from other attributes, and 
what place and rank it holds in his nature. 

The theme which we are to consider is the greatest of themes, and one of 
the most difficult. The difficult; arises partly from the relation of the divine 
attributes to the divine essence. But here, at any rate, it is plain that the 
attributes are not themselves God, nor are they mere names for human 
conceptions of God. They have an objective existence. They are actual 
qualities, distinguishable from each other and from the essence to which 
they belong. As in matter, so in mind, qualities imply a substance in 
which they find their unity. God is a spiritual substance, and of this sub- 
stance the attributes are inseparable characteristics and manifestations. 

Holiness is one of these characteristic qualities of God. We call it an 
attribute, because we are compelled to attribute it to God as a fundamental 
power or principle of his being, in order to give rational account of certain 
constant facts in his self-revelations. The attributes are qualities without 
which God would not be God. Intellect is an attribute of man, because man 
would not be man without it. — And here arises another difficulty. Every 
essential attribute of a moral being has both its active and its passive sides. 
Active truth presupposes passive truth ; truthful speaking, thinking, know- 
ing, are impossible without truth of being. 

Otherwise, the attributes of God would be his acts ; his very being would 
be synonymous with his volition. This cannot be; although such names as 
Thomasius and Julius Miiller might be cited as its advocates. If God were 
primarily will, and the essence of God were his act, it would be in the power 
of God to annihilate himself, and our primitive belief in God's necessary 
existence would be a delusion. Behind all the active aspects of God's attri- 
butes we must recognize the passive. Love is an active principle in God, 
but it could not be active unless there were a foundation for this activity in 
its very nature. And in any thorough analysis of the attributes, either of 
man or of God, the consideration of the passive side must come first, — the 
thought of the attribute as quality must come before the thought of the 
attribute as power. 

Let us now apply what has been said to the attribute of holiness. What 
is holiness? I think we shall say at once that it is purity. When we speak 
of a pure soul, we mean not simply that the acts of that soul show an unde- 
viating rectitude, that its words are transparently true and just, that its 
very emotions and thoughts are free from all sensuous or selfish stain, but 
we mean that the spirit itself, in its inmost substance and essence, is devoid 
of all tendency or impulse toward the wrong. 

Among men we know that there is only an approximation to such purity as 
this. Absolute purity is not even an episode with us. We are never wholly 
single in our motive. Even when we would do good, evil is present with us, 



190 THE HOLINESS OF GOD. 

and below the surface-stream, which sometimes seems so clear, there are tur- 
bid undercurrents which God sees even if we do not. Most often two 
streams, plain even to our own sight, flow on side by side, like the Arve 
after its junction with the Rhone; or the Ohio, made up of the Alleghany 
and the Monongahela, not yet fully united. The muddy current Is the cur- 
rent of our natural life, but we are compelled to recognize in the clear stream 
a branch of the river of the water of life that flows from the throne of God. 
That stream which joins itself to ours to purify and cleanse Is clear as crys- 
tal. It proceeds from deep unfathomable fountains in the being of God, 
and it flows on and on without change or stint forever. What then must 
that purity be from which all purity in men or angels is derived, as the 
trickling rill from the inexhaustible reservoir ! 

And yet we must not allow ourselves to think of holiness in God as if it 
were a passive purity only. All God's thoughts and deeds in truth are pure, 
because they flow from deeper than Artesian sources in his clear and perfect 
nature. But then we are speaking of a moral nature, even when we use 
these physical analogies. The purity of God is also a purity that reveals 
itself in active will. Men ignore this consciously or unconsciously. They 
conceive of holiness in God as a still and moveless purity, like the unspotted 
whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless serenity of the blue sky 
after a summer rain. They forget that all God's moral attributes are pene- 
trated and pervaded by will. 

In God there is nothing inert. He is alive in every part. That mighty 
will which brought the universe into being, and which unweariedly sustains 
it from hour to hour — that mighty will whose reflection and result we see 
in the fixed successions of nature, and in the majestic order of science — 
that will is the active element in God's holiness. Holiness is purity, but 
purity unsleeping — the most tremendous energy in the universe eternally 
and unchangeably exerting itself — "that living Will that shall endure, when 
all that seems shall suffer shock." 

Holiness, then, is not the passive material purity that is unconscious of 
itself and indifferent to change or injury. It is purity in conscious and 
determined movement. All the intensity of human volition, all the com- 
bined energy of all human wills, is as feebleness compared with that concen- 
tration of mental and spiritual power which is involved in the holiness of 
God. Holiness in him is imaged in the sea of glass, of which the book of 
Revelation speaks. It is of crystal purity, but there is more than that. In 
it the enemies of God are overwhelmed. It is a "sea of glass mingled with 
fire!" 

I have said that God's holiness is purity exercising will — purity willing. 
What is the object of this willing? I answer, itself. Holiness in God is 
purity willing, affirming, asserting, maintaining, itself. In virtue of his 
holiness, God eternally asserts and maintains his own moral excellence. We 
have a faint analogue in human experience. There is such a thing as a man's 
duty to himself. You respect no man who does not respect himself. You 
revere genuine dignity of character. When the fierceness of slander or of 
temptation assaults the true man, there is no nobler sight on earth than to 
see him holding fast his integrity, and asserting his innocence before God 
and the world. So did Job of old, and within certain limits God justified 



THE HOLINESS OP GOD. 101 

Job's self-affirming righteousness against the cruel accusations of his falsj 
friends. 

Self-preservation is the law of life. Shall it bo the law of all the lower 
creation, teaching the birds and the beasts their arts of defense, and men 
and nations to be jealous of their rights and liberties, and shall it not be thp 
law of virtue, that highest life of all? Shall purity not stand for itself and 
maintain its own existence? Ah, it is not till men have purity, that they 
feel their right to live. It is the pure soul that has in it the clear instinct of 
immortality. Get God's life into you, and it becomes duty to live, and to 
assert and maintain that life forovermore. 

Aye, there are times in the experience of the Christian when this new and 
God-given purity seems lifted up above the strife with sin. For a moment 
we seem to catch a glimpse of our heavenly freedom. Then we see that 
holiness la not simply the antithesis t% moral evil, so that its existence is 
dependent upon the existence of that which is its opposite. We see that 
purity in the soul is a positive thing, and not a negative. Without a glance 
at the sin that seems for a brief space put beneath our feet, our whole being 
rejoices that it reflects something of the light which no man hath seen or can 
see, and that it will reflect that light of the divine purity throughout eternity. 

These are but faint analogies, but they are real analogies, of something 
infinitely higher than themselves. There is a self-preserving instinct, a 
self-maintaining life, a self-asserting purity in man. And is there no instinct 
of self-preservation In God? Shall the central life of all life not maintain 
itself? Shall the source of all purity not respect itself and assert itself? 
We say, "Let justice be done though the heavens fall." Let us rather say, 
"Because justice is done, the heavens do not fall." If God could be unjust 
to himself, the universe would perish. The purity of God, forever main- 
taining itself, divine perfection asserting itself as the highest good and the 
highest end. infinite moral excellence willing its own perpetuity and domin- 
ion — this is the holiness of God. Purity of substance, energy of will, 
self-affirmation — these make up the idea of it. In a word, holiness in God 
is the self-affirming purity of the divine nature. 

Let us now, as the second division of our great theme, inquire what 
relation the holiness of God sustains to other attributes of his being. And 
first, to justice. The answer easily presents itself. Justice is simply tran- 
sitive holiness, or holiness exercised toward creatures. The same holiness 
which exists in God in eternity past, manifests itself as justice, so soon as 
moral intelligences come into being. Before creation God was holiness. 
just as he was love and truth. The one God — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — 
is sufficient to himself. As he has in himself an infinite object of knowl- 
edge, he is the eternal truth. As he has in himself an infinite object of 
affection, he is the eternal love. And as he has in himself an infinite object 
of will, he is the eternal holiness. The trinity in unity assures God's inde- 
pendence, his sovereignty, his blessedness. He does not need to create for 
his own sake. Because God is Father, Son. and Holy Spirit, there is the 
foundation for intelligence, communion, activity, in the infinite ranges of 
his own being. If he creates, therefore, it is not to augment his own bless- 
edness, but to communicate it to others. If he makes the worlds, it is not 
of necessity, but of grace. 



192 THE HOLINESS OF GOD. 

God is holy, whether creation exists or not. But the moment moral 
creatures come into being, this holiness of God has relations to them, and 
holiness in relation to creatures is justice. The self-affirming purity of God 
demands a like purity in those who have been made in his image. As God 
wills and maintains his own moral excellence, so all creatures must will and 
maintain the moral excellence of God. There can be only one centre in the 
solar system. The sun is its own centre and the centre for all the planets 
also. So God's purity is the object of his own will, and it must be the object 
of all the wills of all his creatures also. See how all arbitrariness is excluded 
here. God is what he is — infinite purity. He cannot change. If creatures 
are to attain the end of their being, then, they must be like God in moral 
purity. Justice is nothing but the publication and enforcement of this 
natural necessity. 

The law of God, therefore, is simply a transcript of God's being — the 
holiness of God in the form of moral requirement. Law can no more be 
different from what it is, than God can be different from what he is. And 
justice does not make law — it only reveals law. Justice is holiness declaring 
to creatures, in their own constitution, in conscience, in providence, and in 
the written word, the fundamental facts of being. 

In this sense justice is legislative holiness. But justice is executive holi- 
ness also. God will not only demand purity in his creatures, but he will 
enforce this demand. That mighty will that asserts the divine purity as the 
thing of supreme worth, will flow on like an infinite river and bear upon its 
bosom the whole universe of moral beings. Resist that current, and you are 
overwhelmed by it. Because God is God, you must perish. That mighty 
will is the substance and strength of law. When you make your thrust 
against the law, by transgression, you find that law is elastic ; because the 
living will of God is in it, there is a counter-thrust that prostrates and 
destroys you. 

And so retributive justice, binding moral evil and penal misery together 
in inevitable and dreadful union, is simply the reaction of God's holiness 
against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. Punishment is God's holy 
will maintaining and vindicating the divine purity. Justice itself is legis- 
lative and retributive holiness ; and God can cease to demand purity and to 
punish sin, only when he ceases to be holy, that is, only when he ceases to 
be God. 

Holiness, in the form of justice, is therefore necessarily the detecter and 
condemner and punisher of impurity and selfishness. The whole nature of 
God is affected with revulsion from moral evil, and not only with revulsion 
but with abhorrence and indignation. But let us remember that this anger 
of God against the wicked is not a human anger. In it is no passion or 
malice. It is the legitimate expression of God's purity, the calm judicial 
vindication of his righteousness, the exact apportionment of retribution to 
transgression. God's holiness as much binds him to punish sin, as sin binds 
the sinner to be punished. 

Years ago the city of Rochester witnessed a strange scene. Senator Ira 
Harris, then Judge of the Supreme Court, was to pronounce sentence of 
death upon a brutal criminal, whose ignorance of the English language made 
necessary the intervention of an interpreter, even to communicate to him 



THE HOLINESS OP GOD. 193 

the meaning of the words that sealed his doom. Those who knew Judge 
Harris have not forgotten the large mould of his miud and the correspond- 
ingly magnificent port of the man. The bearing of the Judge that day 
seemed the very embodiment of the majesty and impartiality of the law, 
but coupled with this there was a deep compassion for the miserable being 
before him. As he addressed the convicted man tears were seen trickling 
down his cheeks, his voice trembled and broke, he could not go on. The 
solemn hush of that court-room was like the silence of the grave that was 
just opening to receive the murderer. Justice paused — but justice must be 
done. With a struggle that shook his whole frame Judge Harris regained 
his self-control, and the words were spoken that consigned the criminal to a 
felon's death. Those words were awful, because it was felt that there could 
be no recall. 

So God's compassion lingers ere it speaks the sinner's separation from 
him forever; but that lingering only makes more remediless the sinner's 
fate. The justice that has in it no semblance or trace of human caprice, the 
justice that ouly makes manifest to the universe the natural relations 
between the purity of God and the creature's sin, the justice that renders its 
desert to moral evil even at the cost of its own grief, this is the justice that 
the sinner has to fear. The very absence from it of all earthly passion is its 
characteristic mark. And so we represent justice as holding an even scale, 
and as weighing merit and demerit with bandaged eyes. She is no respecter 
of persons, and from her decisions there is no appeal. 

There is one other attribute to which holiness has an important, but a 
very different relation. I mean the benevolence or love of God. Let us 
understand clearly what love is. It is the impulse to self -communication, 
the attribute in virtue of which God is moved to give, of his own life and 
blessedness. Love existed in God, before men existed, or before angels 
were made. "Thou lovedst me," says Jesus, "before the foundation of 
the world." From eternity God was love, because from eternity there was 
the communication of all his fullness to the Son. In Christ and through 
Christ, God gives of his own life and blessedness to us. 

Do we not know from our experience of earthly love what this self -giving, 
self-imparting, self -communication is? Do we call that love, in which there 
is no giving, but only demanding, taking, receiving? Do we believe in a 
person's love, who fastens himself to us because of the praise we give him 
or the good of whatever sort he can get from us? No, there is no true love 
without self-sacrifice, self-devotion, the merging of my interests in your 
interests, the giving of myself to you that my life may fill and bless your 
life. And this is God's love — the giving of himself for us and to us in 
Jesus Christ. ' ' Hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for 
us." "When the Son of God gives up all for us upon the cross of shame, 
when he gives himself to us by entering our hearts and uniting himself 
indissolubly with us, then and then only we see what is the nature and 
essence of love. 

We see at once that love cannot be resolved into holiness. Self-imparta j 

tion is very different from self-affirmation. The attribute which moves God 

to pour out is not identical with the attribute which impels him to maintain. 

Self-communicating grace is not the same with self-preserving purity. Nor 

13 



194 THE HOLINESS OF GOD. 

on the other hand can we resolve holiness into love. Tlie two ideas are as 
distinct as the idea of integrity on the one hand and of generosity on the 
other. 

One may call holiness God's self-love, if he will, but this gives only a 
superficial and verbal unity. Self-love is not love at all, for there is in it no 
element of self-surrender. We cannot turn holiness into love, then, merely 
by giving it a name into which the word "love" enters as a component 
part. In truth, holiness is wrongly described as "self-love," even when 
this term is taken in its proper sense. Self-love is the desire for one's own 
interest and happiness. But God's holiness Is something infinitely nobler 
than this. The utilitarian element is wholly wanting from it. God wills 
and maintains his own moral excellence not because of the good which will 
flow to him thereby, but simply because that moral excellence Is in itself 
the thing of supreme worth. As no man is truly virtuous who loves virtue 
for what he can make by it, so God has no ulterior motive in being holy, 
and for this reason holiness can never be defined as God's self-love, or the 
desire for his own interest and happiness. 

If holiness, then, is not even God's self-love, much less is it God's love to 
the universe. It is not a form of benevolence toward his creatures, a mani- 
festation of desire for their good. It has an independent basis in the nature 
of God, and so exists before and apart from creation. Yet no error in 
modern thinking is more prevalent or more pernicious in its results than 
this one, of making holiness to be a mere exercise of love. 

See how far-reaching the consequences of this error are ! Holiness in 
God ceases to be valuable for what it is in itself — it becomes valuable only 
as a means to an end. Happiness is the only good and the only end. If 
the happiness of the universe required it, God might cease to be holy; he 
would be bound to be unholy, if greater good might come thereby. Law 
is only an expedient for the attainment of happiness, and may be done away 
when it fails of securing its end. Punishment is only a means of reforming 
the offender, or of deterring others from following his example. Sin can be 
pardoned without atonement, and the incorrigible transgressor may be loosed 
so soon as punishment ceases to be of benefit. And so the foundations of 
every important doctrine of Christianity are swept away. Law, sin, atone- 
ment, retribution — all these defenses of the faith are untenable, when once 
the Redan, the citadel of God's holiness, is surrendered to the foe. 

How completely opposed to right reason is this view that holiness is a 
form of benevolence, a means of securing happiness ! If this were so, 
supreme regard for happiness would be the very essence of all virtue. But 
we know that to serve God for the mere sake of reward to ourselves, or of 
happiness to others, is not to serve him at all. Holiness is binding upon us 
entirely apart from its useful results. God is displeased with unholiness, 
entirely apart from the effects of misery which follow in Its train. His law, 
like the sun in the heavens, declares and reflects his glory. God must pun- 
ish the violators of that law, whether the punished are benefited thereby or 
not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account 
— not because punishment will work good to the universe ; indeed, no pun- 
ishment can be of benefit to the universe that is not just and necessary in 
itself. 



THE HOLINESS OF GOD. 195 

Justice moreover is something invariable; it comes equally to all. It 
cannot be the same as love, for love varies with the moral worth of the object 
and with the sovereign pleasure of the bestower. It Is the very nature of 
love to choose out the object of its affection. Men choose the ends to which 
they will devote their charities and we call them benevolent, and God dis- 
penses his bounty as he will. He gives to one and withholds from another. 
Poverty and riches, ignorance and intellect, follow no law of merit. But 
God does not dispense justice thus. That is something which every man 
may claim from him. Surely this justice that varies not, Is not a mere name 
for love, that has its endless gradations and that declares its freedom in the 
infinite variety of gifts and conditions which it distributes among mankind. 

But let us turn to Scripture wholly. Why does the Psalmist pray that 
God will chasten him not in anger? Because chastening in anger is differ- 
ent from chastening in love, and the fatherly chastening of the Lord is the 
opposite of being condemned with the world. God hates, abhors and 
destroys the wicked ; hatred, abhorrence and destruction are not love nor 
forms of love. Many times in Scripture is chastening referred to love : 
"Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth." But nowhere in the whole range 
of God's word is punishment referred to love ; many times it is referred to 
holiness. In the book of Revelation, when the great whore is judged, the 
company of heaven cry: "True and righteous are thy judgments!" When 
the wicked are destroyed, the saints say with one voice: "Who shall not 
fear thee, for thou only art holy!" 

Not from love to the universe does God punish. "I do not this for your 
sakes," he says, "but for my holy name's sake." The fires that fell from 
heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrha were not acts of mercy to soften hard 
hearts and bring sinners to repentance. They were manifestations of self- 
vindicating holiness, visiting indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish 
upon persistent wickedness, cutting short the day of grace, removing for- 
ever the chance of reformation, and ushering the enemies of God not into a 
world of new opportunities and privileges, but into a world of retribution 
compared with which, as Jesus himself intimates, the fire and brimstone of 
the earthly destruction were far more tolerable. God is love indeed, but 
God is light also ; and because he is moral light, in whom is no darkness at 
all of impurity or sin, to all iniquity he is a consuming fire. 

Holiness and love both exist in God. We have seen what holiness is, and 
how it differs from love. Let us ask last of all, which of these is to be 
regarded as the primary and fundamental attribute of the divine nature? 
We have but two sources of information here, our own moral constitution 
and the word of God. From our own nature we may learn something of 
the nature of him in whose image we are made. Let us recall that great 
discovery of Bishop Butler : ' ' the supremacy of conscience in the moral 
constitution of man." To conscience every other impulse and affection, 
voluntarily or involuntarily, has to bow. Happiness and righteousness 
stand on two very different planes, and righteousness is evermore the higher. 
The money in my hands may be needed to help a family in distress ; yet, if 
it is my only means of paying an honest debt, even to a man who needs it 
not, I am bound to pay my debt, though the family starve. Be just before 
you are generous, conscience whispers always. 



lu:» TIIE HOLINESS OF GOD. 

Now that which is highest in us is highest also in God. As we may be 
kind, but must be righteous, so God, in whose Image we are made, may be 
merciful, but must be holy. Mercy is optional with him. He was not 
under compulsion to provide a redemption for sinners. Salvation is a matter 
of grace, not of debt. He can apply the salvation he has wrought out, to 
whomsoever he will, "i will have mercy on whom I will have mercy," is 
his word. Love is an attribute which, like omnipotence, God may exercise 
or not exercise, as he will. But with holiness it is not so. Holiness must 
be exercised everywhere. -We thank God for his mercy — for this is the free 
act of his grace. But we never thank him for speaking the truth — for this 
he must do from the necessity of his own nature. Justice must be done 
always; otherwise God would be unjust; shall not the Judge of all the earth 
do right? But who of all this world of sinners could complain if God should 
pardon others, but not pardon him? Can we doubt then whether love or 
holiness is the more fundamental in the divine nature? 

But look once more to Scripture and the light is clearer still. See there 
the actual dealings of God. See how holiness conditions and limits the 
exercise of every other attribute. See how redeeming love, when it would 
save mankind, can do this only by itself submitting to the rod of justice and 
suffering in our stead, — violated holiness requiring expiation for sin, while 
love submissively meets and answers its requisitions. See how the eternal 
punishment of the wicked reveals the holiness of God, even when love can 
hope for no relief or benefit to the transgressor, — the demand of holiness 
for self -vindication overbearing the pleading of love for the sufferers. 

Does the word of God teach that there is such a thing as everlasting 
death? Does God not only pity the sinner, but abhor and repel him? Does 
he press into the conscience with his condemning sentence, frown upon the 
wrong-doer with an angry eye, drive the wicked from him with a naming 
sword, prophesy eternal wrath in the world to come? Does love hide her 
head from the finally impenitent, and the mercy of the Lamb change to the 
wrath of the Lamb? Then there must be a principle of God's nature, not 
only independent of love, but superior to love. Even so it is. The mighty 
will that constitutes the stay and life of the universe is directed toward one 
thing — the maintenance, revelation and diffusion of holiness. Not the 
holiness of the happy, but the happiness of the holy ; peace to the pure, but 
to the impure everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord — this 
is the plan on which the universe is built. 

What has been said throws, in my judgment, a new and valuable light 
upon the great question of future punishment. The common view that holi- 
ness is a form of love, or is under bonds to love, can justify the penalties of 
the world to come, only from considerations of utility, — to use the words of 
Mr. Beecher : "I believe that punishment exists both here and hereafter, 
but it will not continue after it ceases to do good. With a God who could 
give pain for pain's sake, this world would go out like a candle." So the 
Univer.salist holds that "the punishment of the wicked, however severe and 
terrible it may be, is but a means to a beneficent end; not revengeful, but 
remedial ; not for its own sake, but for the good of those who suffer its inflic- 
tion." * And some, who can see no good to be reaped from punishment by 



•Art. "Universalism," in Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia. 



THE HOLINESS OF GOD. 197 

the lost themselves, declare that punishment is for the good of the universe. 
The security of free creatures is to be attained through a gratitude for deliv- 
erance, "kept alive by a constant example of some who are justly suffering 
the vengeance of eternal fire." So says Dr. Joel Parker.* 

Let us ask these writers also: What beneficial effect can these sufferings 
have upon the universe, unless they are just in themselves? And if just in 
themselves, then the reason for their continuance lies not in any benefit to 
the universe, or to the sufferers, that may accrue therefrom. "If the Uuiver- 
salists' position were true," — I quote here from a late English Review, t — ■ 
"we should expect to find some manifestations of love and pity and sympathy 
in the infliction of the dreadful punishments of the future. We look in vain 
for this, however. We read of God's anger, of his judgments, of his fury, of 
his taking vengeance, but we get no hint, in any passage which describes 
the sufferings of the next world, that they are designed to work the redemp- 
tion and recovery of the soul. If the punishments of the wicked were chas- 
tisements, we should expect to see some bright outlook in the Bible-picture 
of the place of doom. A gleam of light, one might suppose, would make 
its way from the celestial city to this dark abode. The sufferers would catch 
some sweet refrain of heavenly music, which would be a promise and 
prophecy of a far-off but coming glory. But there is a finality about the 
Scripture-statements of the condition of the lost which is simply terrible." 

The reason for punishment lies in the holiness of God. That holiness 
reveals itself in the moral constitution of the universe. It makes itself felt 
in conscience, imperfectly here, fully hereafter. The wrong merits punish- 
ment. The right binds, not because it is the expedient, but because it is 
the very nature of God. "But the great ethical significance of this word 
right will noL'be known," — I quote again from Dr. Patton, — "its imperative 
claims, its sovereign behests, its holy and imperious sway over the moral 
creation will not be understood, until we witness, during the lapse of the 
judgment-hours, the terrible retribution which measures the ill-desert of 
wrong." Is this a doctrine of "pain for pain's sake?" Ah, no! God has 
no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. It is a doctrine of pain for holi- 
ness' sake ; the necessary suffering of the transgressor who spurns God's 
love ; the inevitable reaction against itself of a human nature that was made 
for purity, but is now lost to purity; the involuntary vindication, on the part 
of the sinner, of the great truth that in the nature of God the two infinites, 
love and holiness, are not commensurate, but that holiness is evermore 
supreme. 

Triumphant holiness, submissive love, — are these then in conflict with 
each other? Is there duality, instead of harmony, in the nature of God? Ah, 
there would be, for one fact — the fact of the cross. The first and worst 
tendency of sin is its tendency to bring discord into the being of God, by 
setting holiness at war with love, and love at war with holiness. And since 
both these attributes are exercised toward sinners of the human race, the 
otherwise inevitable antagonism between them is removed only by the aton- 
ing death of the God-man. Their opposing claims do not impair the divine 
blessedness, because the reconciliation exists in the eternal counsels of God : 



* Lectures on Fniyersalism. 

t Art. by F. L. Patton, in Brit, and For. Evang. Rev. Jan. 1878, p. 137. 



198 THE HOLINESS OF GOD. 

Christ is "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." In him and 
in his cross, long before the Savior came, ''mercy and truth met together, 
righteousness and peace kissed each other." Even Calvary, with its bleed- 
ing love on the part of the Son, and the darkness and horror of that forsak- 
ing on the part of the Father, could not have accomplished in those few 
hours the redemption of the world, if it had not been the drawing-back of 
the veil that had hid an eternal fact in the nature of God, in other words, if 
it had not been a revelation of God himself. In the cross, we see the majesty 
of holiness at one with the self-abnegation of infinite love. That God might 
still be just, while pardoning the transgressor, the Judge gave himself to 
death for us. He bore the wrath of violated holiuess, that we might be saved 
from wrath through him. 

And yet, let us not imagine that love fails to have proper recognition, when 
we make holiness supreme. It is only in the light of this holiness of God 
that we can properly estimate God's love to sinners. When we think of 
what holiness is, it would indeed at first sight seem to exclude love. The 
most impossible of all things would seem to be, that this God, whose holi- 
ness is the fundamental and controlling attribute of his being, should love 
those who have broken the bonds of his authority and have polluted them- 
selves with moral evil. Sin is an abomination to him. His purity loathes 
it; his judicial sentence condemns it; his anger burns against it. And yet, 
wonder of wonders ! — he loves the sinner and cannot see him perish. The 
complex nature of God is strangely capable at once of these two mighty 
emotions — hatred of the sin and love for the sinner; or, to put it more ac- 
curately, love for the sinner, as he is a creature with infinite capacities of joy 
or sorrow, of purity or wickedness, but simultaneous hatred for that same 
sinner, as he is an enemy to holiness and to God. 

Except as we scale the heights of God's holiness, we shall never fathom 
the depths of God's love. Only as we see the inaccessible whiteness of that 
celestial purity that rises like Alpine summits far-withdrawn, can we begin 
to appreciate the love that stooped to inconceivable abasement, that it might 
lift us out of the blackness and hell of our depravity and guilt. Against this 
solemn back-ground of holiness and judicial indignation, the yearning pity 
and the melting tenderness of the Godhead seem inexpressibly sweet and 
fair. The Old Testament must come before the New, the Law before the 
Gospel, John the Baptist before Christ, or all these last lose their dignity 
and significance. And what the preaching and the teaching of our day needs 
most of all is a profound conviction of that holiness of God which will by no 
means clear the guilty, and which charges guilt upon every impure act, dis- 
position or state of human soul. 

A great teacher, as he gave his last counsels to a class of young men in 
course of training for the active work of life, said to them these words : 
"Would that upon the naked palpitating heart of each one of you might be 
laid one red-hot coal of God Almighty's wrath!" And thus I would say, 
also, if I could only know that love would follow, and would quench that coal 
with one precious drop of the red blood of Christ. Nay, will love ever follow 
and heal and deliver, if the sense of wrath has not gone before? No man 
in his sins, indeed, can ever enter into the blaze of God's holiness, and live. 
Yet some sight of it, such as the Spirit gives, Is the indispensable condition 



THE HOLINESS OF GOD. 199 

of a lofty Christian life, — yes, Is an Indispensable condition of salvation. 
From the sight of holiness we need to be led on to the sight of love, or the 
end will be only remorse and despair. Yet still it is true that there can be 
no more salutary discipline and preparation, either as respects the learning 
of doctrine or the doing of duty, than those which are derived from a heart- 
searching, awe-inspiring apprehension of the divine holiness ; for it is the 
law, in which that holiness is revealed, that is the appointed school-master, 
to lead us to Christ. 

I would fain close this sermon with an appeal to every hearer who Is not 
yet a Christian, and to every Christian whose conceptions of God's purity 
have hitherto been faint and dull, that he will seek a new knowledge of this 
attribute of God. May God himself, by his Holy Spirit, be our teacher, that 
we may see how great and just a God he is with whom we have to deal; how 
impossible it is without holiness for any man to see the Lord ; how deep is 
the blackness of our sin against the whiteness of his purity ; how needful it 
was that the Son of God should die to save us from it; how instant and im- 
mediate is the necessity of repentance and renewal; how certain is the doom 
of the unrepenting transgressor; and how fearful a thing it is to fall into the 
hands of the living God. Why should I not address directly any hearer 
who is yet unsaved, and say to him : My friend, if you are ever saved, either 
God must change, or you must. He must either cease to be God by giving 
up his holiness, or you must cease your rebellion and become pure. Do you 
think that he will change? Ah! he changes not. Make sure then that you 
change your place and character and life ; for you must change, or die ! 

For my part I give in my allegiance gladly to this holiness of God. I 
know that I must bend to the mighty Will that moves and controls all things, 
whether I will or no. I had rather be the molten iron that runs freely into 
the mould prepared by the great Designer, than be the cold iron that must 
be hammered into shape. I know that the whole universe must bow to that 
holy will at last. I would not be among the spirits that bow in hell. But 
this is not my reason for giving in my allegiance to holiness. I bow to it 
because it is the highest, the fairest, the grandest thing of all. I bow to it 
because it is the only worthy object of homage and love and service in the 
universe. To be like God, to be pure as God is pure, to be partaker of his 
holiness, — this, to a created being, is the summit of all honor and ambition. 
Will you not choose this end with me? Will you not recognize this supreme 
fact of the universe, and give in your allegiance to the holiness of God? 

On the day after the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter, the citizens of 
Chicago gathered in the vast auditorium in which the National Convention 
had nominated Abraham Lincoln, to take the oath of allegiance to the gov- 
ernment and to the Constitution. It was said that twenty thousand men 
stood under that single roof. They were of all classes and all parties, but it 
seemed to me that the Spirit of God had made them one. A Justice of the 
Supreme Court of the United States stood forth and held aloft a Bible, and 
called upon every man in that vast multitude to hold up his right hand and 
swear. With a voice that reached the remotest corners of the great enclos- 
ure, he repeated the first words of the oath: "We do solemnly swear!" 
And like the sounding of the sea, or the breaking of thunder from the sky, 
all that multitudinous host repeated after him: "We do solemnly swear!" 



200 THE HOLINESS OF GOD. 

"To support the Constitution of the United States!" And still they fol- 
lowed: "To support the Constitution of the United States!" And so the 
oath proceeded till the solemn close: "So help us, God!" For many a 
man, the taking of that oath meant the giving up of property and life ; but 
it was taken with an intense and exultant enthusiasm, for the cause of the 
country was felt to be the cause of God. If there were traitors there that 
day, they made no sign. Rebellion hid itself in fear. 

There shall be a greater gathering soon. The universe shall assemble to 
recognize the right of holiness to reign. I hear the mutitude that no man 
can number cry, as the voice of many waters and as the voice of mighty 
thunderings, saying: "Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth ! " 
Will you be among those who give in their allegiance to God's holiness, 
on that great day? or will you be among those- whose impenitence and 
rebellion is punished by exclusion from the presence of God and from the 
society of the holy? I pray you, avoid that fate, if you are still unreconciled 
to God, by making your peace with him without delay. Join yourself to 
Christ by submission and trust, and that God whose purity now seems only 
to repel and menace will seem "glorious in holiness." and this attribute 
of his will become the object of your deepest homage, the pledge of your 
defense from evil, and the model for a strenuous character and an unspotted 
life! 



XV. 
THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST.* 



It is the question of the ages. Propounded eighteen centuries ago, it has 
been a living question ever since, and was never agitated so much as now. 
Every year the press brings forth its new life of Christ. The term "Chris- 
tology" is a coinage of our own generation, and it indicates that the study 
of Christ's person has become a science by itself. The New Testament of 
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ wins more readers to-day than any other 
book in the world. The character of Christ is the standard of all excellence, 
even by the confession of those who are enemies to his gospel ; and he him- 
self declares that by our attitude toward him we shall be judged. The 
question "What think ye of the Christ?" is asked of each one of us to-night; 
it will be asked of us when we stand at last before God ; and the answer will 
determine our eternal destiny. I am glad that the Scriptures enable us to 
answer it aright. They point us to the two natures of our Lord which united 
constitute him the ladder from earth to heaven. On the one hand, he is the 
Son of Man ; on the other hand, he is the Son of God. It is my purpose, 
first, to show what these phrases mean ; and then, secondly, to draw from 
them certain important practical lessons. 

Observe then that Christ is Son of Man. This can mean nothing less than 
that Christ is true man. It means much more besides, but let us first grasp 
and insist upon this. Christ is man. The ancient docetic view which held 
so strongly to his divinity that it left no room for his humanity — the view 
that in the incarnation Deity passed through the body of the Virgin as water 
through a reed, taking up into itself nothing of the human nature through 
which it passed — this was all an ignoring and a contradiction of Scripture. 
When the New Testament assures us that Jesus Christ was the Son of David 
and of the stock of Israel, when it describes him as sitting weary upon 
Jacob's well, as sleeping upon the rower's cushion, as suffering upon the 
cross, and as breathing out his soul in death, there is one thing which we 
cannot mistake and that is that this Son of Man is man. And that not 
simply as respects the reality of his human body. He had a human mind 
also, and that mind was subject to the ordinary laws of human development. 
He grew in wisdom, as well as in stature and in favor with God and man. In 
his mother's arms he was not the omniscient babe that some have supposed. 
In his later years he suffered, being tempted, as he could not have suffered, 
if all things had been open to his gaze. Even to the last, it would seem 
that he was ignorant of the day of the end. for "of that day," he tells us, 
"knoweth no man, neither the angels of God, neither the Son, but the 



* Preached in Sage Chapel. Cornell University, May 25. 18S4. as a sermon 
on the text, Mat. 22: 42 — "What think ye of the Christ? Whose son is 
he?" 

201 



202 THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 

Father." Not till his twelfth year, at his interview with the doctors In the 
temple, does he apparently become fully conscious that he is the Sent of 
God, the Son of God ; and even then he must learn obedience to parents, 
and prepare for his public ministry by the gradual growth of mind and 
heart and will, amid the humble duties of son, brother, citizen, and member 
of the Jewish Synagogue. 

There are two pictures by modern artists, the one of which illustrates the 
false, and the other the true view of Jesus' human development. The first 
is by Overbeck, the celebrated German painter. It represents the child 
Jesus at play in Joseph's work-shop. Child as he is, his great future sacri- 
fice looms up before him continually, and even in his play he is fashioning 
sticks and blocks into the sh£ipe of a cross, and so is rehearsing in his infancy 
the tragedy of Calvary. I see no indication in Scripture that this concep- 
tion is true, or that the great future experiences of our Lord were ever thus 
early anticipated. The second picture is by Holman Hunt, the Englishman. 
It is entitled "The Shadow of the Cross." It also represents the carpenter's 
shop at Nazareth. At the close of a weary day, when the level rays of the 
setting sun are streaming through the door, Jesus, the carpenter, turns from 
his toil and stretches out his arms in sheer fatigue. The shadow of those 
outstretched arms, and of that relaxed and tired form, is thrown upon the 
opposite wall. There the long upright saw, and the smaller tools ranged 
transversely, make the rude semblance of a cross, and the shadow of the 
Savior falls upon it. At one side, Mary, the mother of Jesus, weary of the 
long delay in the manifestation of her Son, has been trying to revive her 
faith in those old promises that had accompanied his birth, by opening the 
casket in which had been kept the gold, frankincense and myrrh, which the 
wise men from the east had brought. The sudden stopping of Jesus' work 
startles the mother, and turning to look at the Savior, her eye falls upon 
that prophetic cross upon the wall and the shadowy form of her Son stretched 
upon it, and the sword pierces her own heart also. But Jesus does not see 
the cross ; his face is turned from it. His is still a countenance of youthful 
energy, — weariness and sadness, if you please, but still, not yet of anguish ; 
his hour is not yet come. Holman Hunt's picture is truer to the gospel nar- 
rative than Overbeck's. Instead of fashioning crosses, Jesus was far more 
probably, as Justin Martyr, the old church Father, tells us, making ploughs 
and yokes, and so by hard manual toil supporting the widowed mother 
whom Joseph's death had left dependent upon his care. Jesus walked by 
faith, not by sight. His knowledge was a growing knowledge. His prayers 
were real prayers — full of strong crying and tears. He was made perfe< t 
through suffering. And all this testifies that he was one of us — a veritable 
man like ourselves. 

But was there nothing peculiar about the humanity of Jesus? Ah yes, 
he was not only man — he was the ideal man. When he is called Son of 
man, it is intimated that he is man in the highest possible sense, the central, 
typical man, in whom is realized the perfect idea of humanity as it existed 
in the mind of God. By this I do not mean that in all respects this glory 
belonged to him in the days of his flesh. Those were days of humiliation. 
I do not know that the man Christ Jesus was surpassingly beautiful in his 
physical form. At first sight, it might seem strange that we have no authen- 



THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 203 

tic description of Jesaa' person. Whether lie was great or small of stature. 
we know not. The passage in Josephus with respect to bis appearance is 
unquestionably spurious, and the portrait said to have been presented to 
King Abgarus does not date back further than to the seventh century. Was 
our Lord exceptionally noble, or exceptionally mean, in person? We cannot 
say with certainty. Scripture has been cited to sustain each hypothesis. In 
the synagogue of Nazareth, the "gracious words that proceeded out of his 
mouth" would almost seem to betoken the noble presence and winning man- 
ner of the natural orator ; while, on his way to Jerusalem to suffer, there was 
a majesty of mien which so deeply impressed the disciples that they were 
amazed and afraid. But then we read in the prophets, that "his visage is 
more marred than any man;" "he hath no form nor comeliness, and when 
we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him." So the 
Byzantine painters conceived that they had full warrant for representing 
Christ as emaciated, and aged before his time, — did not the people say to this 
young man: "Thou are not yet fifty years old?" But on the other hand, 
the Italian painters represented him as the model of all manly beauty, — did 
not the Psalmist say: "Thou art fairer than the children of men?" Per- 
haps the truth is midway between the two. Christ joined himself to our 
average humanity; so far as personal advantages were concerned, taking 
that which is neither exceptionally mean nor exceptionally noble. But just 
as there are persons, undistinguished from the rest, who in times of sorrow 
seem positively ugly, but through whose plain features at other times of 
spiritual exaltation the rapt soul seems to shine so gloriously that the poor 
earthy investiture is transfigured, and you wonder that you ever thought 
of them as other than beautiful, so It may be that the Son of man, iu his 
common, every-day. working garb of humanity, appeared only as the man of 
sorrows, while to little children there was a smile that drew them to his 
arms, to earnest seekers of salvation he was full of grace and truth, and to 
his trusted followers upon the mountain-top there was the flashing forth of 
a supernatural majesty and glory. So he teaches us that mere physical 
endowments are not the noblest, but that if we seek first the kingdom of 
God even these things shall be added to us, as "the head that once was 
covered with thorns, is crowned with glory now." 

Of what temperament was Jesus? Mercurial or saturnine, lymphatic or 
phlegmatic, nervous or equable, sanguine or calm? Who does not perceive, 
the moment the question is asked, that none of these temperaments pre- 
dominated in him? The story of his life gives us illustration of the best 
features of them all. He can be swift and direct as the thunderbolt against 
hypocrisy; he can be deep and calm as the summer sea, when he comforts 
his disciples. Who ever thinks of Christ as a Jew? There was no Jewish 
grasping or bigotry in him. All the free spirit and restbetic insight of the 
Greek, all the Roman reverence for law, all the Hebrew worship of holiness, 
all the love that breaks down the barriers of the nations and makes all races 
one- — all these were in Christ. What woman, though she were the tenderest 
and most delicate of all, ever thought that Jesus would be more able to 
sympathize with her if he were woman instead of man? Chaucer wrote long 
ago: "Christ was a maid, though shapen as a man." All the spiritual 
excellences of both the sexes were in him, — he possessed the feminine as well 



204 THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 

as the masculine virtues. Indeed, without gentleness and sympathy no high 
manhood is possible. True manhood is something more than mere mascu- 
linity. Plato says that each human being is but a moiety of the perfect 
creature, wandering through the wide and barren earth to find its other half. 
Shakespeare echoes the thought when he declares that : 

" He is the half part of a blessed man, 
Left to be finished by such as she ; 
And she a fair divided excellence, 
Whose fullness of perfection lies in him." 

And so Tennyson says : 

"• Yet in long years liker must they grow; 
The man be more of woman, she o* man ; 
He gain in sweetness and in moral light. 
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world." 

And the same poet addresses Christ and says : 

" Thou seemest human and divine. 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou ; 

Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours to make them thine." 
Have we ever reflected that all the qualities which attract cur love In men, 
aye, even in the dearest objects of our earthly affection, exist in Christ in 
infinitely greater degree and abundance? All true and noble souls, whether 
regenerate or unregenerate, are but faint reflections of this glory of him who 
is the original and only light of the world. All the excellencies of character 
that appear in John, Paul, Augustine, Luther ; the intellectual acumen, the 
emotional fervor, the power of conscience, the energy of will, that make 
great thinkers, great friends, great reformers, great men. are only scattered 
rays, which find their focus in the humanity of Christ. He is no still Thomas 
a Kempis — seraphic in devotion, but holding himself aloft from his age and 
making little impression on it ; he is no fiery John Knox — stern and hard in 
all his indignant righteousness ; but he has all the good in both of these, 
with none of their defects, — aye. all the good of a thousand others like them 
melted into one. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection 
and worship, so that love him as we may we never can love too much, but 
must ever come infinitely short of his desert. He includes in himself all 
the possible perfections of humanity — all the perfections needful to make 
him our eternal model — all the perfections which finite humanity is pro- 
gressively to realize through the ages that are to come. 

I have said that Christ is man, and that he is the ideal man. But I must 
lead you further. Christ is the lifc-giviny man. He not only has human- 
ity, and perfect humanity, but he gives it to others. He is not simply the 
bright, consummate flower of the race, the noblest fruit from this human 
stem, but he is a new beginning and fountain-head of humanity, the second 
Adam, in whom the race that had been despoiled of its inheritance in the 
first Adam finds its true source of spiritual life. So absolutely new is this 
beginning, this inauguration of a fresh and pure humanity within the bounds 
of the old race, that skeptics have denied the possibility of it. and have called 
it an effect without a cause. But we are persuaded that the same God who 
cica ted humanity at the first was perfectly capable of recreating it, when it 
had apostatized and rebelled. God is a sufficient cause. We do not need 



THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 205 

to explain Christ by his natural antecedents. We grant that the absence of 
narrow individuality, the ideal universal manhood which we find in Christ, 
could never have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation. Much 
less, without taking into account a recreating act of God, could we explain 
the existence of man without sin. Here is one, holy, harmless, undefiled, 
separated from sinners ; one who never prays for forgiveness, but who imparts 
it to others; one who challenges his bitterest enemies to convince him of the 
least sin; one who alone of all mankind can say: "The prince of the world 
cometh; and he hath nothing in me" — nothing of evil desire or tendency 
on which his subtlest temptations can lay hold. 

Now the very idea of such a man as this surpasses all human powers of 
invention, for men invent characters like their own. The source of it can 
only be in a real life once lived here upon the earth ; and if that life once 
was lived, it must have come from God. Corrupted human nature cannot 
produce that which is uncorrupt. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." 
"Had Christ been only human nature," says Julius Miiller, "he could not 
have been without sin ; but life can draw even out of the putrescent clod 
materials for its own living." The new science recognizes more than one meth- 
od of propagation even in the same species; and while the supernatural con- 
ception of Christ is a mystery to us, it is a mystery that well nigh explains 
every other mystery. The only explanation of such a humanity as Christ's 
is that it came from God by a new impulse of that power which created man 
at the beginning. And so Christ becomes not only the embodiment of all 
that is noble in the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning 
of a new humanity — a new source of life for the race. Here is a new vine, 
whose roots are in heaven, not on earth, a vine into which the degenerate, 
half-withered branches of the old humanity may be grafted, so that they 
may have life divine. "The first man Adam became a living soul; the last 
Adam a life-giving Spirit." A new race takes its origin from Christ, as the 
old race took its start from Adam. "He shall see his seed,"— he shall be 
the centre and source of a new humanity. The relation of the Christian to 
Christ supersedes all other relationships, so that "he that loveth father or 
mother more than me" — that is, values more highly his natural ancestry 
than he values his new spiritual descent and relationship, — "is not worthy 
of me." Christ's human nature is a human nature that is germinal and 
capable of self-communication, and it constitutes him the spiritual head and 
beginning of a new and holy race. O, thou wonderful Savior, who hast not 
only life in thyself but the power of an endless life, that thou mightest be the 
first born among many brethren, the founder of a new city and kingdom of 
God, help us to see how great a thing is that humanity which thou hast 
taken to thyself, and the glorious possibilities of which thou hast undertaken 
to set forth before the universe ! 

Thus we have seen that the phrase "Son of man" intimates that Jesus is 
man, possessed of all the powers of a normal and developed humanity; that 
he is the ideal man, furnishing in himself the pattern which humanity is 
progressively to realize ; and that he is the self -propagating man, who in the 
power of the Spirit raises up for himself a new race which shall answer to 
the idea of humanity as it first existed in the mind of God. But there is 
more than this in the phrase "Son of man." That phrase intimates also 



206 THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 

that he is more than man. Suppose I were to go about proclaiming myself 
"Son of man." Who does not see that it would be mere impertinence, 
unless I claimed to be something more. "Son of man? But what of that? 
Cannot every human being call himself the same?" When one takes the 
title "Son of man" for his characteristic designation, as Jesus did, he 
implies that there is something strange in his being Son of man ; that this 
is not his original condition and dignity ; that it is condescension on his part 
to be Son of man. In short, when Christ calls himself Son of man, It 
implies that he has come from a higher level of being to inhabit this low 
earth of ours. And so, when we are asked "What think ye of the Christ? 
whose son is he?" we must answer, not simply, He is Son of man, but 
also, He is Son of God. 

Jesus himself was conscious of this divine Sonship. Looking back into 
the depths of eternity past he could say: "Before Abraham was, I am;" 
"O, Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had 
with thee before the world was." Even here in his earthly life he is not 
confined to earth; he can speak of "the Son of man which is in heaven," 
and can say, "I and my Father are one." He exercised divine powers and 
prerogatives, when he said to the raging sea, "Peace, be still"; and to the 
troubled soul, "Thy sins be forgiven thee." John saw the evidence of Deity 
when Jesus showed that he "knew what was in man." Thomas saw the evi- 
dence of Deity when the resurrection-body of Christ passed through the 
solid walls of that upper chamber and appeared in the midst of the disciples 
when the doors were shut. At the beginning of Christ's ministry. Nathaniel 
could say: "Thou art the Son of God, the King of Israel." When that 
ministry was half finished, Peter could say: "Thou art the Christ, the Son 
of the living God." And after its close the beloved disciple could write: 
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, 
glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." 

These testimonies that Christ is the Son of God are drawn from the Scrip- 
tures. But there is proof nearer at hand, in the experience of every Christian. 
Every soul redeemed from sin recognizes Christ as an absolutely perfect 
Savior, perfectly revealing the Godhead, aud worthy of unlimited worship 
and adoration, — that is, recognizes Christ as Deity. But Christian experi- 
ence also recognizes that through Christ it has introduction and reconcilia- 
tion to God as one distinct from the Son, one who was at enmity with it on 
account of its sin, but is now reconciled by Jesus' death. In other words, 
while recognizing Jesus as God, we are also compelled to recognize a 
distinction between the Father, and the Son through whom we come to the 
Father. So in like manner, when our eyes are first opened to see Christ as 
a Savior, we are compelled to recognize the work of a divine Spirit in us, 
who has taken of the things of Christ and has shown them to us, and this 
divine Spirit we necessarily distinguish both from the Father and from the 
Son. Thus the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is only a transcript of 
Christian experience ; and the hymns and prayers of the church addressed 
in all ages to the Holy Spirit and to Christ, equally with the Father, are 
witness that this doctrine is the truth of God. Although this experience 
cannot be regarded as an independent witness to Jesus' claims, since it only 
tests the truth already made known in the Bible, still the irresistible impulse 



THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 207 

of every person whom Christ has saved to lift his Redeemer to the highest 
place, and to bow before him in the lowliest worship, is strong evidence that 
only that interpretation of Scripture can be true which recognizes Christ's 
absolute Godhead. 

There is one other proof that Christ is the Son of God. It is found in 
Christian history. The essential difference between ancient and modern 
civilization lies in the changed view of the relation of the individual to the 
state. In classic times the individual was held to exist for the sake of the 
state. In modern times the state exists for the sake of the individual. 
Then the individual had no freedom and no rights — he was but an append- 
age and servitor in the train of the conquering state. Now the state finds 
its highest glory in protecting the rights, and in securing the development, 
of the least and lowest of its corporate members. The dignity of woman, 
and the sacredness of human life, are evidences of a new spirit animating 
our modern civilization — a spirit utterly unknown to the most cultivated 
nations of antiquity. What has wrought the change? Nothing but the 
death of the Son of God. When it was seen that the smallest child and the 
lowest slave had a soul of such worth that Christ left his throne and gave 
up his life to save it, the world's estimate of values changed, and modern 
history began. And so history itself is a testimony to the Deity of Christ; 
for unless Christ had been felt to be infinite and divine, this change from 
the old to the new never could have been wrought. Is it possible that this 
most beneficent change in history has been the result of belief in a lie? 
Oh, no ! Christ is the centre of history. Without him history has no order, 
and no philosophy of history is possible. The scattered events of the world's 
life-time have no meaning, until they are looked at in their relation to Jesus 
Christ and his kingdom. Just as the heavens were a maze and tangle till 
the Ptolemaic system was exchanged for one in which the sun and not the 
earth was the centre, so human history is an inextricable labyrinth until 
Christ, the Sun of righteousness, is recognized as the centre around which all 
persons and events revolve. Heathen and Jewish history respectively were 
but the negative and positive preparations for his coming. The modern 
world, so far as it has in it the elements of truth and righteousness, is but 
the outgrowth of the principles which he introduced in his incarnation, his 
doctrine, and his death. Nations grow in power, according as they accept 
his law ; and more and more it is demonstrated that the kingdoms that will 
not serve him shall perish. For to the Son it has been said: "Thy throne, 
O God, is forever and ever." 

So we have before us a wonderful twofold being, not only Son of man, 
but also Son of God. And now, among the lessons of the theme, let us con- 
sider, first, our need of Christ's humanity. We need a Savior that is truly 
man, one who will bring down God to our human understanding, one who 
will give us a brother's sympathy and example, one who has trod the same 
paths of suffering which we have to tread, one who has been tempted in all 
points like as we are, yet without sin. It is not enough for us to have a 
divine Redeemer. It is not enough for us to have a Redeemer whose human- 
ity is merely nominal. There was an old patristic notion that Christ's human- 
ity, in union with his deity, was like a drop of honey mingled with the ocean ; 
but it was rightly judged heretical, for it was as much as to say that the hu- 



208 THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 

manity of Christ is so swallowed up in his deity as to be altogether lost. We 
need to maintain the unchanged and perfect humanity of our Lord, as much 
as we do the unchanged and perfect divinity. The ages when the church 
has lost sight of the humanity have been ages of the greatest declension in 
doctrine and practice. One of the greatest pictures in the world, Michael 
Angelo's tremendous fresco of the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel at 
Rome, is an illustration of that declension. How well I remember the day 
when its awful grandeur first rose before me ! On the left, I seem still to 
see the dead rising from their graves and making their way to meet the 
Judge. Righteous and wicked alike come before him. The martyrs come 
bringing the instruments of their martydom, as evidences of their love for 
their Lord. There is St. Sebastian, with the arrows with which he was 
pierced ; there is St. Catherine with the wheel on which her body was broken. 
Heavenly messengers bear aloft Christ's crown of thorns, the nails that 
were driven through his hands and feet, the pillar to which he was chained 
when they scourged him, the cross upon which he hung during those 
long hours of agony,- — all these as pledges of salvation for the saints, but 
as swift witnesses against the wicked. The wicked come despairing before 
their Judge; and, as they receive tbeir doom, they pass downward and are 
caught by fiends and devils. And who is the Judge? A wrathful Jupiter, 
with no trace of human compassion upon his brow, but grasping thunder- 
bolts and hurling them against his foes. So Michael Angelo pictured Christ ! 
But the most striking and fearful feature of the picture is the presence of 
the Virgin Mary, at her Son's right hand, and the turning of her head 
away from the condemned. That the merciful mother of our Lord should 
refuse to interfere in their behalf, is the last element in the cup of the 
misery of the wicked. See what resulted from forgetting the humanity of 
Jesus ! Men must have a compassionate and tender being, to intercede for 
them. So they elevated the Virgin to the place of Christ, and made her the 
only advocate for sinners. To call Christ only God, is as pernicious an 
error as to call him only man. When men ignore the merciful and faithful 
High-priest, who can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, they 
fall into the worship of Mary and the invocation of the saints. When men 
deny the living human Christ, who is with us always unto the end of the 
world, they must have some substitute, and they find it — oh, how poor 
and mean! — in the "real presence" of the wafer and the mass. 

We need Christ's humanity — that is the first lesson. But there is a 
second. It is this : We need Christ's divinity also. For only as Christ is 
divine, can he make on infinite atonement for us. There is a debt to be 
paid, which we can never pay ourselves, — a reparation to be made, which we 
can never render. Every soul convinced of sin, feels that none but an infi- 
nite Redeemer can ever save it. God must suffer, if man is to go free. lie 
could not suffer, if he were only God. He can suffer, because he is not only 
God, but also man. Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire, if it 
were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body ; so the 
otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs, through his union with 
humanity, which he never could suffer, if he had not joined himself to our 
nature. There is such a union with humanity — a union so close that Deity 
itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Shall we say 



THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 209 

with John of Damascus, that, as the man who fells a tree does no harm to 
the sunbeams that illuminate it, so the blows that struck Christ's humanity 
caused no pain to his Deity? On the contrary, it was the very greatness of 
his Deity that made his agony ineffable. Because Christ was God, did he 
pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Ah, rather 
say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering which was abso- 
lutely infinite. In that infinite suffering, we see the cup of God's just 
indignation drunk to the very dregs ; the otherwise unappeasable demands 
of violated conscience satisfied. Christ's flesh is meat indeed, and Christ's 
blood is drink indeed ! Because Christ is God, his atonement is sufficient. 
Because he is God, the union which he effects with God is complete. If 
he were only man or angel, he would still be finite; the gulf between 
him and God would still be infinite; he never could bring us nearer to God 
than he was himself. But since he is God, he is able to bring us to the 
very holy of holies, to the very heart of God, to living union with the 
Father of our spirits ; nay, in him we become partakers of the divine nature, 
one spirit with the Lord — we dwelling in God, and God dwelling in us; an 
indissoluble and eternal fellowship with the Father and with the Son and . 
with the Holy Ghost. We need his humanity, — but ah, what should we 
do without his Deity? A human Savior alone can never reconcile nor 
re-unite me to God. But a divine Savior can. 

"Jesus, my God! I know his name, 

His name is all my trust ; 
Nor will he put my soul to shame, 

Nor let my hope be lost." 
Yes, he has both — the human sympathy and the divine power — and he 
has them now. And here is the third lesson : We need this humanity and 
this deity perfectly and eternally united in the one person of our Lord. And 
so it is. Christ did not take human nature, as some of those Indian gods are 
fabled to have done. The Hindoo avatars were only temporary unions of 
deity with humanity, and after that humanity had been drawn for a little 
time into the brightness of the godhead, it was cast aside, as a worn out 
garment, and Buddha returned alone to his heaven. How different is the 
union of humanity with Deity in Christ ! Forever stands our humanity in 
heaven. It has ascended the throne of the universe. It has entered into 
the partnership of the Trinity. It is the pledge and earnest of our glor- 
ification. We too shall reign with Christ; we shall judge angels; "round 
about his throne," in the striking language of the Revised Version, "are 
four and twenty thrones," on which the representatives of the redeemed 
shall sit ; and all things shall be ours, because we are Christ's and Christ is 
God's. Let us not lose the blessing of this great truth, that Christ has taken 
our whole humanity with him, and that there in heaven he still has the 
pierced hands and feet that were nailed to the bitter cross for us. There he 
has a human soul, now capable of divine love and intervention in our behalf. 
There he has a human body, of wonderful beauty and of wonderful powers, 
the model and the pledge of our resurrection-body. Everything that took 
place in Christ shall take place in us. He wrought nothing for himself 
alone, but all for the race of which he became a part. "For he that sancti- 
fieth, and that they are sanctified are all of one," — of one body, I think the 
14 



210 THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 

meaning is, — "for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren.** 
"Therefore our citizenship is in heaven ; from whence also we wait for a 
Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall fashion anew the body of our 
humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according 
to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself." 
We need his humanity ; we need his Deity ; we need this humanity and 
this Deity united in one person. But there is a last lesson : We need to 
recognize this humanity and this Deity, aud to recognize them now. When 
a beggar girl is taken by a king to be his bride, she does well to reflect, not 
only upon the greatness of his love, but also upon the return of love she 
owes to him. How infinite the debt we owe to Christ ! How infinite the 
honor of serving him ! To be the servant of such a Lord — this is to be 
higher than the kings of the earth ! No human being ever reaches so high 
a place as when he prostrates himself absolutely at the feet of Jesus, and lays 
there all that he is and all that he has forever. It is a mark of Paul's prog- 
ress in Christian experience that in his later epistles he ceases to call him- 
self "apostle of Jesus Christ," and designates himself simply as "Christ's 
servant." In his earlier letters, it is "Paul, apostle of Jesus Christ;" in 
the later, it is: "Paul, a servant, a bondservant, a slave — of Jesus Christ." 
So he followed Christ's own example, who came not to be ministered unto, 
but to minister ; not to be served, but to serve. Let us all consecrate our- 
selves to the same blessed service. When every Christian shall be in reality 
what the Pope of Rome in one of his titles professes to be — "a servant of 
servants" for Jesus' sake — then the world shall recognize the glory of him 
who is Son of man and Son of God. 

"Oh, not to fill the mouth of fame 
My longing heart is stirred : 
Oh, give me a diviner name, 
Call me thy servant, Lord ! 

" Sweet title that delighteth me, 
Name earnestly implored ; 
Oh. what can reach the dignity 
Of thy true servant, Lord ! 

" No longer would my soul be known 
As self-sustained and free ; 
Oh, not my own, oh, not my own — 
Lord, I belong to thee! " 

Serve Christ, and he will reveal himself to you. The path of service is the 
path of knowledge. You shall see this Son of man and Son of God. when 
you once begin to obey him. For he himself has said: "He that hath my 
commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me, ♦ * * and I 
will love him and will manifest myself to him." A few years ago in one of 
our eastern cities there lived a physician of eminence, whose practice among 
the sick and suffering had given him a large experience of the miseries 
of the world. He was one of those who are sometimes said constitutionally 
to be doubters, and his doubts turned upon the person and the work of 
Christ. He could see the beauty of Christ's character, but the possibility 
of Deity being united with humanity in him he could not see. He could see 
the attractiveness of the Christian scheme — Christ putting his own mighty 
shoulders under all our load of sin and penalty, and bearing the burden that 



THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 



211 



we might go free — but the possibility of this he could not understand. 
And so he went on, the opportunities for religious service in his profession 
putting his conscience under a heavier and heavier load of obligation, but 
his speculative doubts growing thicker and thicker, until it sometimes 
seemed to him as if all the lights of heaven had gone out. One day he met 
an evangelical minister in whom he had confidence, and with the first word 
the trouble of his soul was made known. "I have had the greatest trial of 
my life this morning." "llow so?" replied his friend. "Why, I have 
just been to the bedside of a poor woman who has but a few hours to live, 
and as I was standing there it suddenly flashed upon my mind that her soul 
was in worse case than her body — she seemed the very image of conscious 
guilt and despair. And, do you know? it seemed to me at that moment that, 
if I believed as you do in Christ, it would have been a great privilege to 
kneel down by her bedside and to commend the poor woman to his mercy." 

Oh, my friend!" said the minister, "God has put that into your heart. 
Follow that impulse. We will not stop to settle the question who and what 
Christ is. You know that somewhere in the universe Christ lives — his life 
did not go out in darkness like an extinguished taper. And he is true — he 
said that lie would hear men's prayers, whenever they called upon him. And 
he is more able now, than he was when he heard the poor blind beggar's cry. 
Go back to that bedside, and God go with you!" And the resolve was taken. 
The physician went once more into that sick room, and there for the first 
time in all his life he knelt in prayer to Jesus. He prayed Christ to teach 
that poor woman's soul the way to God. But as he prayed, Christ taught his 
soul the way to God. The one act of recognizing and obeying Christ was 
the door through which Christ himself entered into his heart, and in the 
consciousness that Christ had forgiven his sins and saved his soul he could 
doubt no longer about Christ's divinity, but he fell at Christ's feet like 
Thomas, crying "My Lord and my God!" 

Oh, friend to whom I speak ! I pray you to recognize Christ now ! This 
particular message from God will never come to you — the preacher you may 
never see — again. 

" We twain have met like ships upon the sea — 
Who hold an hour's converse — so short, so sweet; 
One little hour, and then away they speed, 
On lonely paths, through mist and cloud and foam, 
To meet no more." 



Ah ! I mistake, we shall meet, not many months and years from now, — 
shall meet before the throne of that once crucified, now crowned and 
sceptred Savior, once known only in his character as Son of man, then 
known chiefly in his character as Son of God. Be thankful that it is yet 
one of the days of the Son of man. Listen to me, while I urge you to rec- 
ognize him now as Son of God. Now you may think that you do not need 
him; but then you will see that you have no other need. Now, death and 
eternity may seem far away ; but then, they will be the overmastering facts 
of your experience. When I was a mere child I remember riding from the 
city of my residence toward the great lake that skirts our State upon the 
north. I remember the first distant momentary glimpse of its far line of 
blue, and the feeling of mystery and awe which that glimpse inspired within 



212 THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST. 

me. From the summit of the last hill-top as we pressed onward, I rememher 
the yet more solemn feeling with which I looked upon the great waters that 
stretched away before me, now so deep and cold, so fathomless and illimit- 
able. But when we came down to the water's edge and I was led out intci 
the rolling waves, there seemed to be nothing but the sea — the solid shore 
had vanished. I was overwhelmed and lost, but for my father's voice lifted 
up to encourage, and my father's hand stretched out to hold me up. So as 
we go in the journey of life, as youth grows into manhood and manhood 
into age, death and eternity assume larger and larger significance. The 
first distant glimpse of them may overawe the soul, but the final stepping 
down into the flood is a unique experience — it cannot be anticipated. But 
to him who has recognized Christ as Son of man and Son of God, death has 
no terrors; for Christ himself has said: "When thou passest through the 
waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow 
thee." Death may be mighty, but Christ is the Conqueror of death, and his 
pierced right hand can help us through the flood and open to us the gates 
of Paradise upon the other side. And therefore, in life, in death, on earth, 
in heaven, this Christ, Son of God and Son of man, is the only hope of me, a 
sinner; and to you, my fellow-sinner, bound with me to his judgment seat, 
I commend this Christ as the one and only Savior, and pray you in his stead 
that you accept him and be saved. "What think ye of the Christ? Whose 
son is he?" God grant that every one of us may reply: "He is the Son of 
man and Son of God, my Redeemer and my King! 

" Happy, if with my latest breath 
1 may but gasp his name ; 
Preach him to all, and cry in death : 
• Behold, behold the Lamb! ' " 



XVI. 
THE NECESSITY OF THE ATONEMENT.' 



In these words of our Lord, which I read from the Revised Version, we 
find plainly asserted the necessity of his atonement. They are still better 
translated in the Bible Union Version which reads: "Was it not necessary 
that the Christ should suffer these things?" Why was it needful that 
Christ should suffer? In order that prophecy might be fulfilled? Yes, — 
but why were Christ's sufferings matters of prophecy? It must be because 
they were included in the purpose of God — the purpose of God to redeem 
the world. Why could not the world be redeemed without the sufferings 
of Christ? There are two answers to be given to this question. First, 
because there is an ethical principle in God's nature which demands that 
sin shall be punished. The holiness of God requires satisfaction for sin, 
and Christ's penal sufferings furnish that satisfaction. Secondly, because 
Christ stands in such a relation to humanity that what God's holiness 
demands, Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does 
pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his twofold nature, that every claim of 
justice is satisfied and the sinner who accepts what he has done in his behalf 
is saved. 

With regard to the first of these aspects of the atonement — its necessity as 
regards God — so much is said in Scripture that little room is left for doubt 
or ambiguity. Iu his sacrifice. Christ offers himself through the eternal Spirit 
without spot to God. He is set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, 
so that God may be just and yet justify him that believes. Without the 
shedding of blood there is no remission, but the blood of Jesus cleanseth 
from all sin, for he is the propitiation for our sius and not for ours only but 
for the sins of the whole world. These passages declare that the righteous- 
ness of God demands an atonement if sinners are to be saved. 

It is to the second and more difficult aspect of the atonement — its neces- 
sity as regards Christ himself — that I wish to direct special attention. 
many who can see how God can justly demand satisfaction, cannot see how 
Christ can justly make it. The suffering of the innocent in place of the 
guilty seems to them manifestly unjust. They recognize no obligation on 
the part of Christ to suffer. I am persuaded that light can be thrown upou 
this particular point in the great doctrine. We shall understand the neces- 
sity of Christ's sufferings, when we consider what Christ was, and what 
were his relations to the race. 

What were the results to Christ of his union with humanity? I shall 
mention three. The first was obligation to suffer for men ; since, being one 



^ 



* A sermon upon the text, Luke 24: 26 — "Behoved it not the Christ to 
suffer these things?" 

213 



214 THE NECESSITY OF THE ATONEMENT. 

with the race, he had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and 
the justice of God— a responsibility not destroyed by his purification in the 
womb of the Virgin. There is an organic unity of the race. All that there 
is of humanity has descended from one common stock. In our first parents 
that humanity fell from holiness and incurred the great displeasure of God. 
and each member of the race since that time has been born into the state 
into which our first parents fell. The universal prevalence of perverse 
affections, and the universal reign of death, are evidences that the whole race 
is under the curse. What were the two main consequences of sin to Adam? 
They were first, depravity, and secondly, guilt. First the corruption of his 
own nature; and secondly, obligation to endure the penal wrath of God. 
What are the two consequences to us of Adam's sin? Precisely the same: 
first, depravity; secondly, guilt. We are born depraved, or with natures 
continually tending to sin; we are born guilty, or under God's displeasure 
and justly bound to suffer. And so because of this race-unity and race- 
responsibility we bear a thousand ills not due to our individual and conscious 
transgressions, and even infants, who have never in their own persons vio- 
lated a single command of God, do notwithstanding suffer and die. 

Now if Christ had been born into the world like other men, he too would 
have had both these burdens to bear, — first, the burden of depravity, and 
secondly, the burden of guilt. But with regard to the first, he was not born 
into the world like other men. In the womb of the Virgin, the human 
nature which he took was purged of its depravity even at the instant of his 
taking it, so that it could be said to Mary: "That holy thing that shall be 
born of thee shall be called the Son of God," and the author of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews could speak of Christ as "holy, harmless, undefiled, sepa- 
rated from sinners." With regard to the second consequence of sin, how- 
ever, Christ was born into the world like other men. The purging away of 
all depravity did not take away guilt, in the sense of just exposure to the 
penalties of violated law. Although Christ's nature was purified, his 
obligation to suffer yet remained. All the sorrows of his earthly life, and 
all the pains of death which he endured, were evidences that justice still 
held him to answer for the common sin of tbe race. 

The justice of Christ's sufferings has been illustrated by the obligation of 
the silent partner of a business firm to pay debts which he did not personally 
contract; or by the obligation of the husband to pay the debts of his wife; 
or by the obligation of a purchasing country to assume the debts of the 
province which it purchases. There have been men who have spent the 
strength of a life-time in clearing off the indebtedness of an insolvent father 
long since deceased. They recognized an organic unity of the family which 
made their father's liabilities their own. So Christ recognized the organic 
unity of the race, and saw that, having become one of the sinning race, he 
had involved himself in all its liabilities, even to the suffering of death, the 
great penalty of sin. He might have declined to join himself to humanity, 
and then he need not have suffered. He might have sundered his connec- 
tion with the race, and then he need not have suffered. But once born of 
the Virgin, and possessed of the human nature that was under the curse, 
he was bound to suffer. The whole mass and weight of God's displeasure 
against the race fell on him, when once he became a member of the race. 



THE NECESSITY OF THE ATONEMENT. 215 

It was this that Jesus chiefly shrank from when he prayed that the cup 
might pass from him. And when at last God's face was hidden from the 
sufferer, and he cried in agony: — "My God, my God, why hast thou for- 
saken me!" there would have been no sting in death if it had not been the 
wages of sin, justly paid to him who not only stood in the sinner's place, 
but who was made sin for us in the sense of being guilty of the original sin 
of the race, while yet he was utterly free from inherited depravity or 
personal transgression. 

It has been common enough for theologians to recognize an imputed guilt, 
as furnishing an explanation of Christ's sufferings. The poet says : 

" My soul looks back to see 

The burdens thou didst bear 
When hanging on the accursed tree. 
And hopes her guilt was there." 

But this imputation of others' guilt is very difficult to reason, even when 
helped out by John Miller's hypothesis of Christ's federal relation to the 
race. The doctrine of the atonement needs something more than this to 
make it comprehensible. It needs such an actual union of Christ with 
humanity and such a derivation of the substance of his being by natural 
generation from Adam as will make him, not simply the constructive heir, 
but the natural heir, of the guilt of the race. Edward Irving saw this, and 
he declared therefore that Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not 
before the fall, but after the fall. But he ignored the qualification that, in 
his taking it, that human nature was completely purified by the Holy Spirit. 
and so he taught that Christ's humanity was depraved. The true doctrine 
is that the humanity of Christ was not a new creation, but was derived from 
Adam through Mary his mother. Christ, then, so far as his humanity was 
concerned, was in Adam just as we were, and, as Adam's descendant, he was 
responsible for Adam's sin like every other member of the race ; the chief 
difference being that, while we inherit from Adam both guilt and depravity, 
he whom the Holy Spirit purified, inherited not the depravity but only the 
guilt. 

The first effect upon Christ of his union with humanity, then, was that it 
put him under obligation to suffer for the sins of men. But there was a 
second effect — it was the longing to suffer which perfect love to God must 
feel, in view of the demands upon the race of that holiness of God which he 
loved more than he loved the race itself; which perfect love to man must 
feel, in view of the fact that bearing the penalty of man's sin was the only 
way to save him. I have spoken of Christ's shrinking from suffering and 
death because it was the penalty of sin. But this is perfectly consistent 
with an intense longing to pay that penalty, as it was the demand of infinite 
righteousness. That righteousness he loved, more than he loved the whole 
universe besides. That righteousness he saw to be the only worthy object 
of adoration for the universe — the only security for the peace of the universe. 
He understood the requisitions of righteousness, as only one who was per- 
fectly pure could understand them. And when that righteousness presented 
its demands to him as a member of the condemned and guilty race, there 
was that in him which moved him to respond: "Let that righteousness be 
exalted, though I die!" 



21 G THE NECESSITY OF THE ATONEMENT. 

Think bow urgent the demand of conscience sometimes is, even in the 
case of sinful men, and you will get some idea of the yearning of Christ's 
pure heart to offer his great sacrifice. All great masters in literature have 
recognized it. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the 
very essence of tragedy. Marguerite in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great 
Cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the "Dies Irce;" Dimmes- 
dale in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester 
Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming 
forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all 
these are illustrations of the inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to 
satisfy the claims of justice upon it. 

Nor are these cases confined to the pages of romance. That was an 
unusual and exciting scene in a Plattsburg court-room, near the close of a 
trial for murder. The murderer was a life-convict who had struck down a 
fellow-convict with an axe. The jury, after being out two hours, came in to 
ask the judge to explain the difference between murder in the first, and mur- 
der in the second, degree. Suddenly the prisoner arose and said: "This was 
not murder in second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. 
I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I 
ought to be hanged." This left the jury nothing to do but to render their ver- 
dict, and the judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he deserved to 
be. The other case of Earl, the wife-murderer, is still fresh in public recol- 
lection. Earl thanked the jury that had convicted him, declared the verdict 
just, begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice, said 
that the greatest blessing that could be conferred upon him would be to let 
him suffer the penalty of his crime. Now, if wicked men can be moved with 
such desire to suffer, how much more must he desire to suffer whose sym- 
pathy with the righteousness of God was perfect and complete. For man's 
sake Christ longed to suffer, because only through his suffering could man 
be saved. But chiefly for God's sake Christ longed to suffer, for only 
through his suffering could God's righteousness be vindicated. Hence, we 
see him pressing forward to the cross with such majestic determination that 
the disciples were amazed and afraid. Hence we hear him saying — "With 
desire have I desired to drink this cup;" "I have a baptism to be baptized 
with, and how am I straitened till it is accomplished." Here is the truth in 
Campbell's theory of the Atonement. Christ is the great Penitent before God 
— making confession of the sin of the race, which others of that race could 
neither see nor feel. But the view which I present is a larger and completer 
one than that of Campbell, in that it makes this confession and reparation 
obligatory upon Christ, as Campbell's view does not, and recognizes the 
penal nature of Christ's sufferings, which Campbell's view denies. 

There is but one point further. I have shown that Christ's sufferings 
were necessary, first, because he was under obligation to suffer ; and sec- 
ondly, because his love to God and man made him long to discharge this 
obligation. Now, thirdly, I would show, that, being such as he was, he 
could not help suffering — in other words, the obligatory and the desired 
were also the inevitable. Since he was a being of perfect purity, contact 
with the sin of the race, of which he was a member, necessarily involved an 
actual suffering of an intenser kind than we can conceive. There are 



THE NECESSITY OF THE ATONEMENT. 217 

moments in our own experience when the wickedness of some past misdeed 
is revealed to us in a light so appalling, that we get some conception of what 
hell must be to the everlastingly condemned. There are moments when 
our unbelief and ingratitude seem abhorrent and shocking beyond descrip- 
tion. There are times when the sin of others to whom we are closely bound. 
their disregard of Christ and his claims, their grieving of his Spirit, affect 
us so deeply that the remorse which they ought to feel seems to take posses- 
sion of us. So the parents feel, whose daughter has gone astray, — they 
identify themselves with her, feel her shame as if it were their own, cannot 
absolve themselves from the feeling of responsibility. And there are men 
whose hearts are so large and deep, that they feel thus for the sin and misery 
of the world. They look upon the bonds of their brethren, and feel bound 
with them, as Moses identified himself with his suffering people in Egypt. 
And this suffering in and with the sins of men, which Dr. Bushnell empha- 
sized so strongly, though it is not, as he thought, the principal element, is 
notwithstanding an indispensable element, in the atonement of Christ. 

In the last illness of John Woolman, one of the early members of the 
Society of Friends, he gave utterance to the following words. They are in 
the form of an address to God: "O Lord, my God, the amazing horrors of 
darkness were gathered about me and covered me all over, and I saw no way 
to go forth ; I felt the depth and extent of the misery of my fellow creatures 
separated from the diviue harmony, and it was greater than I could bear, 
and I was crushed down under it ; I lifted up my hand, I stretched out my 
arm, but there was none to help me ; I looked round about and was amazed. 
In the depths of misery, O Lord, I remembered that thou art omnipotent, 
that I had called thee Father, and I felt that I loved thee, and I was made 
quiet in thy will, and I waited for deliverance from thee ; thou hadst pity 
upon me when no man could help me. I saw that meekness under sutfering 
was showed to me in the most affecting example of thy Son, and thou wast 
teaching me to follow him, and I said: 'Thy will, O Father, be done.'" 
He had vision of a "dull, gloomy mass" darkening half the heavens, and 
which he was told was "human beings, in as great misery as they could be 
and live ; and he was mixed with them, and henceforth he might not consider 
himself a distinct and separate being." 

Sin is self -isolating, and its watchword is: "Am I my brother's keeper?" 
But love and righteousness have in them the instinct of human unity. 
Nothing human is foreign to the man who lives in God. We do not know 
how completely a perfectly holy being, possessed of superhuman knowl- 
edge and love, may have felt even the pangs of remorse for the condition of 
that humanity of which he was the central conscience and heart. Such a 
holy being was Christ. In him all the nerves and sensibilities of humanity 
met. He was the only healthy member of the race. He could feel the con- 
dition of humanity, when no other member of the race could feel it. When 
a man has been exposed to intense cold and his limbs are frozen, he feels no 
pain, but rather the disposition to sleep, even though he knows this sleep 
will be the sleep of death. But bring the man to the fire, thaw the frozen 
limbs, and the first return of circulation is accompanied by exquisite pain. 
Pain is the very sign of life. S© Christ was the only sensitive and healthy 
member of a benumbed and stupefied humanity. His soul felt all the pangs 



218 THE NECESSITY OF THE ATONEMENT. 

of shame and suffering which rightfully belonged to sinners, but which they 
could not feel, just by reason of the depth and depravity of their sin. 
Because Christ was pure, therefore he must suffer. Not because of what 
he was in himself, but because of what the race was to which he had united 
himself, "it must needs be that Christ should suffer." As he was God, lie 
could be the proper substitute for others; as he was man, the penalty due 
to human guilt belonged to him to bear. 

I have already alluded to the great proof -text which Paul gives us ; let 
me a little more fully elucidate it. In the Second Epistle to the Corin- 
thians, the fifth chapter and the twenty-first verse, we read: "Him who 
knew no sin, he made to be sin on our behalf ; that we might become the 
righteousness of God in him." The two members of the sentence stand in 
contrast to each other; the evident meaning of the one may teach us some- 
thing with regard to the meaning of the other. "Righteousness" here cannot 
mean subjective purity, for then "made to be sin" would mean that God 
made Christ to be subjectively depraved. As Christ was not made unholy, 
the meaning cannot be that we are made holy persons in him. Our "becom- 
ing the righteousness of God in him" can only mean that we became justi- 
fied persons in Christ. Correspondingly, Christ's "being made sin" must 
mean that he is made to be a condemned person "on our behalf." When 
the text speaks of "him who knew no sin," it declares that Christ was not 
personally a sinner— this was the necessary prerequisite of his work of 
atonement. When the text says he was "made to be sin on our behalf," it 
declares also that he was made a sinner, in the sense that the penalty of sin 
fell upon him. 

But not simply penalty — the text declares that guilt was his also. For, 
justification is not simply the remission of actual punishment, but is also 
the deliverance from the obligation to suffer punishment, and as "righteous- 
ness" means "persons delivered from the guilt as well as the penalty of 
sin," so the contrasted term "sin" in the text means "a person not only 
actually punished, but also under obligation to suffer punishment;" in other 
words, Christ is "made sin," not only in the sense of being put under 
penalty, but also in the sense of being put under guilt. 

How was this guilt put upon Christ? The same text intimates the answer. 
It was by Christ's becoming one with our race. As Adam's sin is ours only 
because we are actually one with Adam, and as Christ's righteousness is 
imputed to us only as we are actually united to Christ, so our sin is imput- 
ed to Christ only as Christ becomes actually one with the race. He was 
"made sin," by being made one with the sinners; he took our guilt by 
taking our nature. He "who knew no sin" came to be "sin for us," by 
being born of a sinful stock ; by inheritance the common guilt of the race 
became his. Guilt was not simply imputed to Christ ; it was imparted also. 
As we become justified persons by taking part in his new and redeemed 
nature, so he was made guilty for us by taking our condemned nature in 
the womb of the Virgin. Thus, having our guilt, he can atone; by virtue 
of his divine nature, he can exhaust the penalty of sin and be our substitute; 
becoming justified himself, lie can make all believers partakers of his justi- 
fication. 

In this doctrine of the atonement, I see the only vindication of the justice 



TI1E NECESSITY OF THE ATONEMENT. 219 

of God. On any theory of mere human martyrdom, on any theory of mere 
human sympathy, God would seem to be unjust. That the holiest man of 
all the ages should have been the greatest sufferer, impugns God's justice, 
and fills me with terror and despair. But if Christ stood in the place of 
sinners, and bore the guilt of the race to which he had united himself, then 
in his suffering I see the greatest possible proof of the divine righteousness 
— righteousness that will maintain itself even at the cost of the suffering and 
death of the Son of God. Yes, in the cross I see the glory of God's right- 
eousness- — the Judge himself coming down from his judicial tribunal and 
taking the sinner's place, rather than that one jot or tittle of the law should 
fail. If God so honored his own righteousness, how ought we to honor it ! 
In this doctrine of the atonement I see the only way of escape for the 
sinner. I once tried to tell a convicted sinner about Christ's power to re- 
new his heart. But he replied: "That is not what I want — there is first 
a debt that I must pay. I must make up for my past sins." That is the 
utterance of the unsophisticated heart, when God's Spirit enlightens it. It 
must have atonement, before renewal. It must see some reparation made, 
before it can begin the work of reformation. It was a great delight to me to 
tell that man that his debts had been paid by Christ ; that the reparation 
had been made upon the cross; and that now, "nothing, either great or small, 
remained for him to do," but only to take what Christ had done for him. 
Yes, it was needful for Christ to suffer, if any sinner was ever to be saved. 
But now Christ has suffered once for all. "He was wounded for our 
transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our 
peace was upon him," and, thank God! "by his stripes we are healed." 
The worst of sinners, who believes in Jesus, can say in the language of 
Toplady's hymn : — 

" From whence this fear and unbelief? 
Hast thou, O Father, put to grief 

Thy spotless Son for me? 
And will the righteous Judge of men 
Condemn me for that debt of sin 

Which, Lord, was laid on thee? 

" If thou hast my discharge procured, 
And freely in my room endured 

The whole of wrath divine, 
Payment God cannot twice demand 
First at my bleeding Surety's hand, 
And then again at mine. 

" Complete atonement thou hast made, 
And to the utmost farthing paid 

Whate'er thy people owed ; 
How then can wrath on me take place, 
If sheltered in thy righteousness 

And sprinkled with thy blood? 

" Turn then, my soul, unto thy rest 
The merits of thy great High Priest 

Speak peace and liberty; 
Trust in his efficacious blood ; 
Nor fear thy banishment from God, 

Since Jesus died for thee ! " 



XVII. 
THE BELIEVER'S UNION WITH CHRIST; 



It is strange that a doctrine which Dr. J. W. Alexander called "the cen- 
tral truth of all theology and of all religion " should receive so little of 
formal recognition either in dogmatic treatises or in ordinary religious expe- 
rience. In Dr. A. A. Hodge's Outlines of Theology a brief chapter is devoted 
to it, to which I am greatly indebted, and to which I refer the reader. The 
majority of printed systems of doctrine, however, contain no chapter or sec- 
tion with the title of the present article at its head ; and the majority of 
Christians much more frequently think of Christ as a Savior outside of them, 
than as a Savior who dwells within. There can be little doubt that the com- 
parative neglect with which this truth of the believer's union with his Lord 
is visited, is a reaction from the exaggerations of a false mysticism. It: is no 
less true that there is crying need of rescuing the doctrine from neglect. I 
attempt the present brief and fragmentary treatment of a vast and sublime 
theme, from no conceit of my ability to compass it, but from a profound 
conviction that, ignored though it so commonly is, it is the most important 
of topics, not only for these times, but for all times. 

Doctrines which reason can neither discover nor prove, need large support 
from the Bible. It is a mark of divine wisdom that the doctrine of the Trin- 
ity, for example, is so interwoven with the whole fabric of the New Testa- 
ment, that the rejection of the former is the virtual rejection of the latter. 
The doctrine of Union with Christ, in like manner, is taught so variously 
and abundantly, that to deny it is to deny inspiration itself. There is figu- 
rative teaching, and there are direct statements. The union of the believer 
with his Savior is illustrated from the union of a building and its founda- 
tion, — each living stone in the Christian temple is kept in proper relation to 
every other, and made to do its part in furnishing a habitation for God, 
only by being built upon and permanently connected with Christ, the chief 
corner-stone. It is illustrated by the indissoluble bond that connects hus- 
band and wife, and makes them legally and organically one. The vine and its 
branches are used to convey some proper idea of it, — as God's natural life is 
in the vine, that it may give life to its natural branches, so God's spiritual 
life is in the vine Christ, that he may give life to his spiritual branches. The 
members of the human body are united to the head, as the source of their 
activity and the power that controls their movements, — so all believers are 
members of an invisible body, whose animating and directing head is Christ. 
The whole race is one with the first man Adam, in whom it fell and from 
whom it has derived a corrupted and guilty nature, — so the whole race of 



Printed in the Examiner, June 12. 1879. 
220 



THE BELIEVER'S UNION WITH CHRIST. 221 

believers constitute a new and restored humanity whose justified and puri- 
fied nature is derived from Christ, the second Adam, the atoning Savior. 

But lest we should regard these striking analogies as mere orientalisms of 
speech, to be interpreted only as high-Mown metaphors, the New Testament 
asserts in the most direct and prosaic manner the fact of this union. The 
believer is said to be "in Christ," as the element or atmosphere which sur- 
rounds him with its perpetual presence, and which constitutes his vital 
breath; in fact, the phrase "in Christ," always meaning "in union with 
Christ," is the very key to Paul's Epistles and to the whole Scripture of the 
new dispensation. Christ is also said to be in the believer, and so to live his 
life within the believer, that the latter can point to this as the dominating 
fact of his experience, — it is not so much he that lives, as it is Christ that 
lives in him. The Father and the Son dwell in the believer, for where the 
Son is, there always the Father must be also. The believer has life by par- 
taking of Christ, in a way that may not inappropriately be compared with 
Christ's having life by partaking of the Father. All believers are one in 
Christ, to whom they are severally and collectively united, as Christ himself 
is one with God. So close and complete is this union, that by it the believer 
is made partaker of the divine nature, and becomes one spirit with the 
Lord. And yet these are but a few of the statements of this great fact, 
with which the New Testament abounds. 

It should not surprise us, if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific 
definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a 
fact of life with which we have to deal ; and the secret of life, even in its 
lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest crocus 
that lifts its head in the spring-time witnesses to two facts : first, that of its 
relative independence as an individual organism ; and secondly, that of its 
ultimate dependence upon a life and power higher than its own. So every 
human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection and will, — yet it 
lives, moves and has its being in God. Starting out from the truth of the 
divine omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite 
boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the diviue 
intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us by successive stages in vege- 
table life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet 
there are two stages beyond all these : first, in Christ's union with the believ- 
er, and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of Christ with 
the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite crea- 
tion, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible 
to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance. 

Facts with regard to life, we must often define by negatives. And so it 
is here. We guard the truth from misconception, and cut off the claims of 
errorists of many schools, when we declare that this union with Christ of 
which the Scriptures speak, is not a merely natural union, like that of God 
with all human spirits, as is generally maintained by rationalists; nor a 
merely moral union, as Sociniaus and Arminians declare ; nor a union which 
destroys the distinct personality and subsistence of either Christ or the 
human spirit, as many of the Mystics have believed ; nor a union mediated 
and conditioned by the sacraments of the church — as is held by Romanists, 
Lutherans, and High Church Episcopalians. But we do not deal in nega- 



222 THE BELIEVER'S UNION WITH CHRIST. 

fives alone. We may put our doctrine into positive statement also. The 
Scripture teaches thnt, by faith, there is constituted a union of the soul with 
Christ different in kind from God's natural and providential concurrence 
with all spirits, as well as from all unions of mere association or sympathy, 
moral likeness or moral Influence — a union of life, in which the human 
spirit, while then most truly possessing its own individuality and personal 
distinctness, is interpenetrated and energized hy the Spirit of Christ, is made 
inscrutahly and indissolubly one with him, and so becomes a member and 
partaker of that new, regenerated, believing, and justified humanity of 
which he is the head. 

Still a few words of explanation are possible and requisite. The union is 
an organic one. By it we are constituted members of Christ's spiritual body, 
partakers of his purified and glorified human nature. As every portion of 
a true organism is reciprocally means and end, so, while Christ the head 
lives for the members, the members also live for Christ the head. It is a 
vital union, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or of exter- 
nal influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated 
from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our 
spirits flows. He is the source, not simply of motives and of moral suasion, 
but of vital energy and spiritual strength. Such a union, not of natural 
but of spiritual life, cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments 
presuppose it as already existing. Only faith receives and retains Christ ; 
and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and super- 
sensible, not the act of the body submitting to baptism or partaking of the 
Supper. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Since there is now an 
unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer 
upon our unstable wills, but upon Him, who has said that none shall pluck 
us out of his hand. By temporary declension from duty or by our causeless 
unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the 
soul's house, but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him, and when we 
are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole man- 
sion with his light and love. This union is inscrutable, indeed, but it is not 
mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the 
reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only 
because, in the intimacy of its communion and the transforming power of 
its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so can- 
not be fully described or understood by earthly analogies. 

Such is the nature of union with Christ, — such, I mean, is the nature of 
every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every 
Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and 
this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a 
Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being 
fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually 
possess the kernel while as yet we have paid regard only to the shell, — we 
may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, 
while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God 
often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, winch is Christ in 
him the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer 
access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of cooperation 



THE BELIEVER'S UNION WITH CHRIST. 223 

or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there Is already established a 
union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and 
so, like the miners of the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for 
silver, he Gnds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are 
not separate persons linked together fcy some temporary bond of friendship 
— they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran 
in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a 
union he has with his Savior, and the first understanding of this truth may 
be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of 
the Christian life. 

Theology finds its focus in this truth of union with Christ; and from it, 
as from a central mount of observation, the true meaning and relations of 
all other doctrines may be best discerned. The nature of our relation to 
Adam, in whom the old humanity as an organic unit fell, can be understood 
only in the light of our relation to Christ, in whom the new humanity, in its 
principle and germ, atoned for sin and wrought out a perfect righteousness. 
The atonement itself, in the aspect of it which is most diCficult to reason, 
the just suffering for others of one who was personally innocent, has more 
light reflected upon it from this doctrine of our union with Christ than from 
any other. There is a race-responsibility which belongs to every descend- 
ant of Adam, and this race-responsibility is distinguishable from personal 
responsibility. Christ's corporate union with humanity involved him in 
that race-responsibility, and so, though he was personally pure, law could 
lay her penalties upon the head of our Redeemer. Christ took our guilt 
when he took our nature; he has delivered us from the curse of the law by 
being made a curse for us. 

But atonement is not enough. The atonement makes full satisfaction to 
divine justice and removes all external obstacles to man's return to God. 
But an internal obstacle still remains — the evil affections and will, and the 
consequent guilt, of the individual soul. This last obstacle Christ removes, 
in the case of all his people, by uniting himself- to them in a closer and more 
perfect manner than that in which he is united to humanity at large. As 
Christ's union with the race secures the objective reconciliation of the race 
to God, so Christ's union with believers secures the subjective reconciliation 
of believers to God. As Christ's union with us involves atonement, so our 
union with Christ involves justification. The believer is entitled to take for 
his own all that Christ is and all that Christ has done, and this because he 
has within him that new life of humanity which suffered in Christ's death 
and rose from the grave in Christ's resurrection, — in other words, because he 
is virtually one person with his Redeemer. And so Luther declares: "By 
faith thou art so glued to Christ that of thee and him there becomes as it 
were one person, so that with confidence thou canst say: 'I am Christ — 
that is, Christ's righteousness, victory, etc., are mine ; ' and Christ in turn 
can say: 'I am that sinner — that is, his sins, his death, etc., are mine, 
because he clings to me and I to him, for we have been joined together 
through faith into one flesh and bone.'" 

It will be perceived at once that this connection of atonement and of 
justification with the doctrine under consideration, relieves both of them 
from the charge of being mechanical and arbitrary procedures. To say that 



224 THE BELIEVER'S UNION WITH CHRIST. 

my sin is imputed to Christ while yet there is no tie of life uniting Christ to 
me, or to say that Christ's righteousness is imputed to me while yet there is 
no actual union between my soul and Christ, is as absurd and unscrip- 
tural as to say that Adam's sin is imputed to me while yet there is no natu- 
ral connection between me and Adam. The Bible gives us a more intelligible 
theology; it not only declares that in Adam, that is, in union with Adam, 
all die, but it declares that all who are justified are justified in Christ Jesus, 
that is, in union with him. As Adam's sin is imputed to us, not because 
Adam is in us, but because we were in Adam, so Christ's righteousness is 
imputed to us, not because Christ is in us, but because we are in Christ, 
that is, joined by faith to one whose righteousness and life are infinitely 
greater than our power to appropriate or contain. In this sense we may 
indeed say that we are justified through a Christ outside of us, as we are 
sanctified through a Christ within us. In the words of Jonathan Edwards : 
"The justification of the believer is no other than his being admitted to 
communion in, or participation of, this head and surety of all believers." 
And so we see what true religion is. It is not a moral life ; it is not a 
determination to be religious ; it is not faith, if by faith we mean an external 
trust that somehow Christ will save us ; it is nothing less than the life of 
the soul in God through Christ his Son. Regeneration is the act by which 
God brings the dead soul into union with Christ. And faith is the soul's 
laying hold of this Christ as the only source of life, and so, its only source 
of pardon and salvation. 

But it is in the realm of practical life that we seek the ultimate fruit of 
this doctrine, and by this fruit also we must test it. It will stand the test. 
No truth of the Christian scheme has in it more of power to cheer or to 
purify. Such union as this involves the most sacred fellowship, — not only 
the Redeemer's fellowship with us, so that he is touched by our infirmities 
and afflicted in our affliction, but our fellowship with the Redeemer iu his 
whole experience on earth, and in all that was gained by it for mankind. 
Only upon this principle of union with Christ, can we explain how the 
Christian instinctively applies to himself the prophecies and promises which 
were uttered originally and primarily with reference to Christ: "Thou wilt 
not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see cor- 
ruption." The Christian seems to himself to be reproducing Christ's life in 
miniature and living it over again. He knows the power of Christ's resur- 
rection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable to his 
death. And with this fellowship there is something better still — the trans- 
forming, assimilating power of Christ's life; first, for the soul, giving to it 
the self-sacrificing mind of the Redeemer here, and perfect likeness to his 
purity hereafter; and secondly, for the body, sanctifying it, in the present, 
to be the temple and dwelling of the Lord, and in the future, raising it up 
in the likeness of the body of Christ's glory. This is the work of Christ, 
now that he has ascended and taken to himself his power, namely, to give 
his life more and more fully to the church, until it shall grow up in all 
things into him, the head, and shall fitly express his glory to the world. 

To those who know that they are united to Christ there must be assurance 
of salvation, for in virtue of their union with him, they know that his power, 
righteousness and love are engaged on their behalf. There must be courage to 



THE BELIEVER'S UNION WITH CHRIST. 225 

do or suffer for the Redeemer's sake, — with Paul they may say: "I can do 
all things through Christ who strengtheneth me." With this consciousness 
of our relation to our Lord, we shall be delivered not only from indolence 
and fear, but also from that half-fanatical and impatient earnestness, that 
false fervor and restless activity, which are sometimes mistaken for true zeal. 
There will be patience, when we once know Christ, and rest ourselves and 
our desires in those unwearied hands that move on silently but surely the 
wheels of victory and progress throughout the world. And what better 
argument and encouragement has believing prayer than this, that we are 
one with him whose kingdom and reign on earth are the very aim and goal 
of history, and the intercession of whose Spirit within our souls is the 
unfailing sign and accompaniment of a prevailing intercession before God's 
throne on high? And so the loftiest and most fruitful religious experience 
will be that which most perfectly realizes the oneness of our life with the 
life of the almighty and omnipresent Savior ; which, without any pantheistic- 
confounding of our personality with his, and without any self-deceiving 
notion of our sinless perfection, has yet the blessed assurance of the con- 
stant inward presence of Jesus and of his unchangeable love ; which In all 
humility acknowledges itself so helpless and so dependent on him, that 
severed from him it can do absolutely nothing and must utterly perish, and 
which in that conviction gives up every effort of its own, opening the heart 
to receive Christ's life, and striving to make every act and word and desire 
the expression of that life within. To such an experience every Christian 
may aspire — for it he should pray. Let him thus lose himself, and he shall 
find his true self renewed and restored by the indwelling might of Christ's 
Spirit ; he shall not only trust, but know, that he abides in Christ, and 
Christ in him. So shall his religion be one not of outward compulsion but 
of inward power. So shall life lose its harshness, its anxiety, its fear, since 
for him to live will be Christ, and to die will be gain. 

A single word remains to be said with regard to the wider effects upon 
the world which may be expected to follow the full recognition of this doc- 
trine by the church. All sin consists in the sundering of man's life from 
God, and most systems of falsehood in religion are attempts to save man 
without merging his life in God's life once more. Sacramental and external 
Christianity conceives of man as a mere tangent to the circle of the divine 
nature, touching it and touched by it only at a single point. The only 
religion that can save mankind is the religion that fills the whole heart and 
the whole life with God ; and that aims to interpenetrate universal humanity 
with that same living Christ who has already made himself one with the 
believer. Humanity is a dead and shattered vine, plucked up from its roots 
in God, and fit only for the fires. But in Christ, God has planted a new 
vine, a vine full of his own divine life, a vine into which it is his purpose 
one by one to graft these dead and withered branches, so that they may 
once more have the life of God flowing through them and may bear the 
fruits of heaven. It is a supernatural, not a natural, process. But the things 
that are impossible with men are possible with God, and the process shall 
not cease until he has gathered together in one all things in Christ, and in 
him has perfectly redeemed and glorified the humanity for which and to 
which Christ has given his life. 
15 



XVIII. 
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS.' 



I desire to invite attention to what may seem a somewhat new, but what 
I trust will be esteemed an entirely legitimate, defense of a fundamental 
article of our denominational faith. I propose to approach the subject of 
baptism and its symbolism from a single side, and that, not the dogmatic or 
polemic, but rather the historical. There was such a baptism as the baptism 
of John ; and Christ himself, the embodiment of Christianity and the pattern 
for the church, was baptized by John in the Jordan. I am persuaded that 
the proper understanding of that baptism of Jesus will throw a new and 
valuable light upon the meaning of baptism in the case of Christ's followers. 
Let us first, then, try to put ourselves back in those far-off times, and figure 
to ourselves how the baptism of Jesus came about in the natural order of 
his life, and expressed the meaning of that life. We shall And doctrinal 
and practical lessons all along, but at the end we may stand aside, as it 
were, and look at the great truths which, like separate colored rays, con- 
verge and meet and blend in that scene upon the banks of the Jordan. 

Let us put ourselves back, I say, — back into the times preceding the 
ministry of John the Baptist, when the gospel of the kingdom was just pre- 
paring to break in upon the world. The thirty peaceful years of Jesus' 
early life were past. The vast work, which at the first had appeared dim 
and distant as a form in the mist, had drawn nearer and nearer, and had 
now assumed the hard outline and definite proportions of tremendous and 
inevitable fact. What prophets had foretold, what his own being demanded, 
that must be. Connected in every fibre of his being with the common nature 
of mankind, he saw that he must suffer, the just for the unjust. It could 
not be that human nature should fail of enduring the settled and necessary 
penalty of its sin. And he not only had a human nature, but in him human 
nature was organically united as it never had been before except In Adam. 
If the members suffered, should not also the head? 

When he was but twelve years of age, the consciousness of this divine 
commission had dawned upon him. Sitting as an humble questioner before 
the doctors of the law, the conviction had become overmastering: "I am he 
■ — the teacher and prophet promised long ago, the fulfillment of this spirit- 
ual law which the doctors cannot comprehend, the suffering Messiah against 
whom their pride rebels; I am he — the Sent of God, the Son of God." 
And the eighteen years that followed had made this conviction part and 
parcel of his very being. Growing with his growth and strengthening with 



* Originally prepared as a sermon upon the text, Mat. 3: 15 — "Thus It 
becometh us to fulfill all righteousness," and preached before the Cincin- 
nati Baptist Union ; printed in the Examiner, February 12, and February 
19, 1880. 

226 



THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 227 

rength, it had taken up into itself all the energies of his soul, conscious 
or unconscious, until his life and his work were identical, and he could say: 
"Lo! I come to do thy will, O God I " 

Can we imagine that such years as these were free from agitations and 
anxieties? Can we imagine that the looming-up before him of so grand and 
yet so terrible a destiny was accompanied by no struggle and no temptation? 
We know little, it is true, of those early years. But we know that Jesus 
was very man as well as very God, and tried in all points like ourselves. 
I tul years these doubtless were when compared with the conflict and 

agony to come, but only peaceful as years of preparation for that conflict 
and agony — peaceful as the quiet stationing of batteries and filing by of 
troops on the morning of some day whose sun is to set in blood — peaceful 
as Niagara above the cataract, whose smooth waters, possessed with an irre- 
sistible gravitation, break at length into rapids as they go, as if in conscious 
preparation for that final moment when, agitated to their utmost depths and 
with one consent of majestic self-abandonment, they hurl themselves into the 
chasm below. 

But now at last even such peaceful days as these were over. A voice 
sounded out like a trumpet-call from the wild region near the Jordan, sum- 
moning the nation to repentance, and proclaiming the speedy approach of 
the Messiah. It was the voice of John the Baptist, the last and greatest of 
the prophets, the new Elijah, in his shaggy herdsman's dress of camel's hair, 
the appointed herald and forerunner of the Kingdom. If the whole land 
had been a whispering-gallery, the news could not have gone on swifter 
wings. The all-penetrating power of Luther's theses in Germany was not 
more wonderful. It roused whatever there was left of patriotic and religious 
feeling in Judaea and Jerusalem. Sunk as they were in formalism and 
worhlliness. thousands upon thousands flocked from city and country, and 
were baptized in Jordan, confessing their sins. The voice pierced even to the 
distant valleys of Galilee, and the villages around Nazareth poured forth their 
recruits to John's army of penitents. For nine whole months the work went 
on : spring, summer, autumn went by, and winter came at last ; the wave of 
excitement had swept over all Palestine : the whole land was in a fever of 
expectation ; every eye was looking for the appearance of that grander Per- 
sonage, the latchet of whose shoes John was not worthy to unloose. 

And where was Jesus? In the carpenter's shop of Nazareth, calm, silent, 
unrecognized, yet nourishing a world of mighty thoughts, feeling within 
him a thousand forward-moving impulses, yet waiting in patience and self- 
restraint the time appointed by the Father. Strong as were the inward 
impulses that urged him forward to his work, he could not move from his 
place till John's preparatory ministry had accomplished its purpose. And 
so, while Nazareth was full of rumors, and scores departed every week for 
the Jordan, the household of Mary remained undisturbed. Only Jesus 
recognized in John's work the sign that his time was at hand. 

There came a day, however, when, just as calmly as he had performed his 
humble duties of son, brother and citizen, he left these duties forever, left 
the home of his childhood and the carpenter's bench at which he had worked 
so many years, to enter upon the labor and struggle and suffering that 
belonged to him as the world's Redeemer. It would be matter of intense 






228 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 

interest if we could follow each separate step of his journey as he made his 
way, humble and unnoticed among the crowd of pilgrims, "to Jordan, unto 
John." But we are left to conjecture here. Whether he held himself aloof 
from the multitude and proceeded in silence, or mingled in the talk and 
wayside worship of his townsmen, we do not know. But we do know that 
it was with solemn mind he went. The crisis of his life was just before him. 
He was to break all the ties that bound him to the past. He was to give 
himself to the greatest work man ever had to do. He was to receive his 
final anointing as Prophet, Priest and King. Not in the might and glory 
of his divinity, but as a lowly and agitated son of man, seeking divine grace 
to help in time of need, did Jesus come to John to be baptized of him. 

And here is the first great meaning of his baptism. It was essentially a 
self-consecration. He came to commit himself to the vast work that was 
before him. He felt just as you or I feel on the eve of some great enterprise 
that is to task to the utmost our fortitude and patience and virtue. He felt 
the weakness of mere human nature, and the need of strengthening it by 
solemnly and publicly pledging himself before God and angels and men. 
So — if we may compare great things with small — so Gustavus Adolphus 
felt, when, on leaving Sweden to fight for Protestantism in Germany, he 
assembled the States-General, committed his infant daughter and successor 
to their care, and before all the magnates of his kingdom vowed to deliver 
Germany or die. So the disciple of Christ only follows in the footsteps of 
his Savior, when he strengthens his resolves and commits himself to the 
service of his Master by publicly and solemnly expressing his allegiance and 
devotion in his baptism. For there was a human side to every action of 
Jesus' life. Here, when he came to meet his destiny, and give himself to 
that mighty work whose distant prospect had been at once so fearful and so 
grand, we cannot doubt that there was all the natural shrinking and anxiety, 
all the overwhelming burden of responsibility, that could rest upon the heart 
of any son of man. And we lose sight of a most important feature of Jesus' 
baptism if we fail to see that it was a solemn inauguration of his public 
ministry, in which he strengthened his soul by publicly consecrating him- 
self to the unmeasured toils and trials which that ministry in its very nature 
involved. 

But this was only the first element in its meaning. It was also a symbol 
of his death. The consecration was a definite consecration — a consecration 
to death, — and this was the second thing expressed in his baptism. What 
baptism meant to Jesus, he himself intimated nearly three years after this, 
and about four months before his death. He had been speaking of the 
power of the gospel when his work should be completed and the full glory 
of it should dawn upon the world. To his imagination, the mighty effects 
of it could only be compared to those of fire and flame, seizing upon human 
nature and purifying it in every part, but destroying all that refused to be 
refined. "I am come to send fire on earth, and what will I? Oh, that it 
wore already kindled!" But even while he looked forward with longing to 
that day, the thought came to him that he himself must be baptized in blood 
before he could baptize with fire; all the dreadful pains of the cross rose 
before his eyes ; the gulf of death that was to swallow him up yawned at his 
feet; his soul was the scene of an agony and a conflict such as fell on him in 



THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 229 

the temple and in the garden; he cried in distress: "I have a baptism to 
be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!" 

Still another incident in Jesus' life needs to be compared with this, that 
we may see what idea was in Jesus' mind when he spoke of a future baptism. 
You recollect the request of the ambitious sons of Zebedee, who desired to 
sit, the one on his right hand and the other on his left, in his kingdom. It 
occurred only three or four weeks before Jesus' crucifixion. Examine Jesus' 
answer to this request of James and John, and you cannot fail to see that 
the "baptism" he referred to was his death. He told them that the path- 
way to glory with him must be through a death-suffering like his own. 
"Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism 
that I am baptized with?" Here the cup was the cup of suffering which 
was pressed to his lips in Gethsemane, when he cried to the Father: "If it 
be possible, let this cup pass from me;" and the baptism was the baptism 
of death on Calvary and of the grave that was to follow. 

But how could death present itself to his mind as a baptism? I answer, 
the being immersed and overwhelmed in waters is a frequent metaphor in 
all languages to express the rush of successive troubles; and to our Savior's 
mind the dreadful sufferings and bitter death before him seemed like deep 
and dark waters, into which he must go down until their heavy floods swept 
over him and his life was drowned beneath the billows. In the words of 
the Psalmist, Christ coir 1 say: "I am come into deep waters where the 
floods overflow me. All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me. 
Then the waters overwhelmed me ; the stream went over my soul ; then the 
proud waters went over my soul." The suffering and death and burial 
which were before him presented themselves to his mind as a baptism, 
because the very idea of baptism was that of a complete submersion under 
the floods of waters. So apprehended, there is an untold sublimity in the 
figure that flashed upon his mind. Death was not poured upon him, — it 
was no sprinkling of suffering which the Savior endured, but a sinking into 
the mighty waters with which death and the grave overwhelmed him. 

See the significance of Jesus' baptism in Jordan. It was no merely formal 
and ritual act — there are none such in Christ's religion — least of all were 
there any in the life of Christ himself. All his words and deeds were instinct 
with life and meaning. There was nothing arbitrary in this transaction 
which signalized the beginning of his ministry and the public consecration 
of himself to the work he had to do. No, the essential feature of that work 
was his death, — that was ever in his eyes from the beginning to the end. 
All his teaching and his suffering was but the prelude to that. The cross, 
the grave, the resurrection — these were the crown and consummation of all, 
coloring all the events that came before with their own matchless and crim- 
son light. And so the baptism of Jesus was not only his public consecration 
of himself to the work before him, but it expressed the essential nature of 
that work, — in oth?r words the baptism of water at the beginning of his 
ministry consciously and designedly prefigured the baptism of death with 
which that ministry was to close. 

Stop here one moment to mark the incidental proof which this fact gives 
us of Jesus' understanding, from the very commencement of his public life, 
the meaning and the end of that life. The final agony and death-struggle, 






230 TIIE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 

when they came, were not, as some skeptics have maintained, unforeseen 
and surprising contingencies to him, but were the precise events for whiefl 
he had long been preparing, and to the accomplishment of which he had 
voluntarily and knowingly devoted himself in his baptism. With full 
knowledge of what was to come, Jesus "gave himself for us." In the words 
of one of the purest of religious poets : — 

" As at the first, thine all pervading look 
Saw from thy Father's bosom to the abyss, 
Measuring in calm presage 
The infinite descent, 

44 So to the end, though now of mortal pangs 
The heir, and emptied of thy glory awhile, 
With unaverted eye 
Thou meetest all the storm." 

I have spoken of Jesus' baptism, first, as an act of self-consecration, and 
secondly, as a symbol of the death to which he devoted himself. Let me speak 
of it now, in the third place, as a proof of Jesus' connection with humanity, 
with its sin and its desert of death. Jesus' connection with human sin, and 
his consecration to death for the sins of the world — how clearly that stands 
out in the baptism ! Jesus came to Jordan to submit to John's baptism of 
repentance. And what was John's baptism of repentance? Nothing less 
than the total immersion of the body in water, the plunging of each penitent 
beneath the swift-flowing current, in token that he who submitted to it 
"buried himself into death as one laden with guilt and defilement, and rose 
as a new man to a new and holy life." But Jesus personally, and in every 
act and thought of his life, was sinless ; upon what possible ground could he 
undergo this rite which properly belonged to sinners? And here we come 
to the greatest mystery of God's grace, the person of Jesus Christ, and his 
assumption of the common nature of us all. If Jesus had no connection 
with a sinful and lost humanity, or if that connection with a sinful and lost 
humanity had been merely a factitious and forensic one, then it would have 
been the grossest breach of justice, the sheerest insult to purity, the most 
extravagant of absurdities, that the Lord Jesus should have submitted to an 
ordinance which was in itself, in some sense, a confession of sin and a dec- 
laration that this sin deserved nothing less than death. 

I am persuaded that we can never explain the baptism of our Lord, unless 
we remember that Jesus was "made sin for us," taking our nature upon 
him, with all its exposures and liabilities, yet without its hereditary corrup- 
tion, that he might redeem it and reunite it to God. But this one mighty 
fact, the taking upon him our nature, this does explain it. As one with 
humanity, he had in his unconscious childhood submitted to the rites of cir- 
cumcision, purification and redemption, appointed by the law, and all of these 
were rites appointed for sinners. As one with humanity, he was yet to "put 
away sin by the sacrifice himself." "Made in the likeness of sinful flesh," 
he foresaw that the crowning act of his earthly work must be to "descend 
into death, laden with the guilt of humanity, and as a glorified conqueror 
rise from the grave, the head of a new and holy race." This was the truth 
to which he testified in his baptism, that since "without shedding of blood 
there was no remission," and he had taken to himself the nature that had 
sinned, he had taken to himself death also, and "it must needs be that 



THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 231 

Christ should suffer." So Christ's baptism was au emblem of the burial of 
a sinful humanity into death, that it might rise iu him to life and glory. 

It is in the light of Jesus' participation iu our nature and consequent con- 
nection with human sin, that Jesus' words: "Thus it becometh us to fulfdl 
all righteousness," stand out in their full splendor of meaning. John, you 
remember, had refused to baptize Jesus. Either from previous acquaintance 
or from prophetic insight, John had recognized him, at his coming, as the 
holiest being he had ever known. It seemed to him most unfit that the 
greater should be baptized by the less. Baptism belonged only to such as 
were in some way under the power and penalty of sin, — how could one who 
was "holy, harmless and undented " testify that he was under sin's curse 
and misery? Ah, how dim and imperfect even then were the Baptist's con- 
ceptions of Jesus' work ! Not yet had he reached that loftiest summit of Old 
Testament revelation from which his eyes beheld the cross and he could cry : 
"Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh, and so taketh away, the sins of the 
world." 

It was to remove this very reluctance of the Baptist, that Jesus uttered 
those memorable words: "Suffer it be so now, for thus it becometh us 
to fulfill all righteousness." And what did he mean but this, that only 
through the final baptism of suffering and death which this baptism of water 
foreshadowed, could he "make an end of sins," and "bring in everlasting 
righteousness" to a condemned and ruined world. It is that final baptism 
which is chiefly, if not altogether, in the Savior's eye when he says: "Thus 
it becometh us." The righteousness of which humanity had come short he 
was to fulfill — that which humanity had lost he was to restore. But he 
could not be "the Lord our Righteousness," the head of a new race and 
the source of righteousness for all mankind, except by first suffering the 
death due to the nature he had assumed, thereby delivering it from its 
exposures and perfecting it forever. Therefore he came as the lowest and 
humblest of all that crowd of pilgrims, came as one laden with the guilt of 
humanity, to submit himself in symbol to the death that was its due. How 
fully John understood the words of Jesus, we do not know, — we only know 
that "then he suffered him." Those words about "fulfilling all righteous- 
ness," uttered by one who was himself so righteous, overbore his doubts, 
aud "the Redeemer descended with his forerunner into the rapid waters of 
the sacred river," and there was buried in the likeness of his coming death, 
and raised again in the likeness of his coming resurrection. 

The coming resurrection, did I say? Yes, there was a foreshadowing of 
the coming glory, as well as of the coming sorrow. The events that followed 
had each their separate meaning. Think with what profound emotion Jesus 
must have come up from that Jordan-flood. The die was cast ; the step was 
taken ; henceforth there was no possible retreat ; it was as if the marks of 
death had already been sealed upon hands and feet and brow. The past 
was past forever. No longer the isolated meditative days of Nazareth, but 
a public life of continual struggle and temptation, with the staring eyes of 
the whole world upon him. And on a little way further were the shame, 
the agony, the cross, the grave. How shall he enter these shadows, how 
shall he endure these pains, how shall he perform this work? I point you 
to the scene itself for your answer. See the Savior going up that river-bank 



I 



232 TIIE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 

— see those uplifted hands — see the great soul, unconscious of the crowds 
that gaze upon him, and only rapt in one intense desire for the comfort and 
strength of God, beseeching even there the help and blessing of his Father 
— aye, even while his eyes are lifted to the hills whence alone his help can 
come, see the quick answer from above : " the heavens opened and the Spirit 
of God," the Spirit of grace and power, of wisdom and comfort and peace, 
"descending like a dove and lighting upon him" — never more to leave him 
till his work is done, and he receives his crown and his reward. 

Nor is this all. The Spirit and the Son are there, but this is not enough. 
About this transcendent scene the lustre, not of one or two, but of all three 
persons of the blessed Trinity must shine. The Father also speaks from 
the heavens above: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." 
As the descent of the Spirit is the anointing and qualifying of Messiah for 
his work of Prophet, Priest and King, so the voice from heaven declares the 
acceptance of his consecration to death, and attests his commission from 
God as divine Redeemer of mankind. Jesus not only went forward know- 
ingly to his final baptism of death, but he went forward in conscious accord 
with God's eternal plan and as executor of the counsels of heaven. 

What blessing and relief came to that overburdened heart with this double 
answer to his prayer, we can but poorly conceive. What assurance must 
have flooded his soul — assurance that in all the dreary road before him, his 
humanity should never be left to its own native weakness, but should find 
in God a very present and almighty help in time of trouble 1 More than 
this, the descent of the Spirit was a pledge of victory — a pledge of victory 
grander than ever was vouchsafed to ancient warrior on the eve of battle. 
It was God's own seal set at the beginning upon Jesus' work — the seal of 
Him whose counsels never fail, and who is omnipotent to execute his pur- 
pose of salvation. These divine attestations, what do they signify but this, 
that the descent into the grave should not be forever ; he should rise again 
triumphant — the heavens should be once more opened to receive him ; 
attended by thousands of angels and with ten thousand times ten thousand 
coming forth to meet him, he should be welcomed to a seat at the right hand 
of the Majesty on high, while to all the universe God should say: "This is 
my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." 

Thus far I have endeavored to set forth,' in its historical connections and 
aspects, that most impressive and sublime act with which Jesus inaugurated 
his public ministry. I have described his baptism as a self -consecration, as 
a consecration to death, as a consecration to death for human sin. Let me 
conclude my presentation of the subject by summing up the symbolic teach- 
ing of this momentous transaction, and so exhibiting what seems to me its 
great doctrinal and practical value. 

I see in the baptism of Jesus, first of all, a vivid representation of the ill- 
desert and fearful penalty of sin. I recollect a picture of the Deluge by 
Gustave Dore\ in which the rising waters have submerged all but the highest 
hill-tops. On these, under an angry sky, lit up only by vivid lightnings, are 
gathered the only survivors from among the wicked. Pale and frantic, they 
fight with wild beasts and with one another for the topmost place of safety. 
Tiny hold appealing hands up to the heavens, but the heavens are black 
and mutter thunder. They look down to the surging waves beneath, but 






THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 233 

these gain upon them every moment, until couquered and despairing they 
fling themselves upon the bare rocks and there await their dreadful inevi- 
table doom. A few moments more, and the ravenous waters will engulf 
them and sweep away their name and memory forever. That picture of 
Gustave Dore is a picture of the destiny of the human race, a picture of 
your destiny and mine, left to our sin and to the judgments which follow in 
its train. 

But there is another picture of the desert and end of a sinful humanity, 
more striking still. The baptism of Jesus, how solemnly that speaks of the 
floods of divine anger that must envelope a guilty race ! What ! must one 
who is purity itself, nay, divinity itself, go down into death, merely because 
he has united himself to my nature? Then my nature must be under the 
ban and curse of death. Must Jesus be overwhelmed with suffering, simply be- 
cause of that which he has in common with all men that have ever breathed? 
Then all men must by virtue of that same nature be under the wrath of God. 
Aye, ten thousand times more than he, for all men have not only inherited 
this nature, but have wilfully perverted their way and set themselves against 
the law of God. I see, then, in this sinking of Jesus beneath the waters of 
the Jordan, the declaration that all mankind are doomed to hopeless burial. 
If Jesus, personally sinless as he was, found that the taking of human nature 
involved death, how much more shall we, who are personally guilty and 
defiled, find that "the soul that sinneth, it shall die." 

Secondly, Jesus' baptism presents to us a picture of human nature deliv- 
ered from the penalty and power of sin. If it had been God's purpose to 
set forth simply the death that was due to sin, we should have seen Jesus 
drowned beneath the waves forever. But this was not all. God purposed 
also to represent humanity as coming up new-born from the grave where its 
.sin and guilt were buried. I need not only to see an emblem of the death 
that is due to sin — I need also to see that this death has been endured for me. 
I need not only to see that human nature has borne the penalty — I need 
also to see that human nature has exhausted the penalty, and has risen from 
it triumphant and free. And this I see depicted in the baptism of Jesus. 
His sinking beneath the Jordan-current typified a death actually endured by 
human nature in him. His rising from the stream once more, and his recep- 
tion of those attestations from on high, typified the resurrection of that 
same human nature, its deliverance from the last remains of sin, and its new 
condition as redeemed from the bondage of the law, filled with the Spirit of 
God, admitted to the honors of sonship in God's family, and glorified in 
and with Jesus Christ its Lord. 

Years ago I saw in a European gallery that masterpiece of Thorwaldsen, 
the Danish sculptor, Christ and his Apostles. The eye wandered from one 
to the other of those twelve marble forms, and in each there was some char- 
acteristic expression that riveted the attention. There was the impulsive 
boldness in the very lines of Peter's face. The tender melancholy of Thomas, 
the artless openness of Philip, the seraphic ardor of John, were all imaged 
In the solid stone. But then each face reminded you also of its possessor's 
peculiar weakness. Peter's rashness and instability, Thomas's doubting, 
were there. The more you gazed upon the statues of the apostles, the more 
you felt a lack- — here were only fragmentary virtues, — and with these virtues 



234 THE BAPTISM OP JESUS. 

were defects and sins. But, standing in a half circle as they were, each form 
by its attitude or look or gesture seemed to point you to the centre, as if all 
their hopes and affections gathered there. And there was the figure of the 
Christ, greater than they in height, and far transcending them in dignity. 
In that one majestic form all the good in them seemed united, and on that 
calm commanding brow there was ineffable holiness and peace. How often, 
as I have vainly sought through the ages for an example of perfectly eman- 
cipated humanity, have I thought of Thorwaldsen's Christ ! How often, as 
I have struggled with the forces of evil in my own nature, have I seen in 
that remembered master-piece of art the mute assurance that there is one 
who has conquered sin and death for me, and who has lifted human nature 
up into union with God and likeness to God ! Towering above all the forms 
of men I see the risen Jesus, and in him my nature ransomed, purified, 
perfected, glorified. And this sublime fact, this sublime hope of humanity, 
I see symbolically represented in Jesus' baptism. His rising from that 
watery grave teaches me that there is now a human nature "without sin," 
and over which "death hath no more dominion" forever. 

But some are doubtless saying: "How difficult it is to believe that this 
external work of Christ has anything to do with us ! Christ's risen and 
glorified humanity — that is not ours — that cannot be made ours." Yes, I 
answer; yes, it may be made ours — it is ours. And this is the third lesson 
taught us by Jesus' baptism. That baptism affords me a picture also of the 
method of my personal salvation, by union with the crucified and risen Jesus. 
I also must die to sin by having Jesus' death reproduced in me. I must rise 
to a new life by having Jesus' resurrection reproduced in me. I must enter 
into communion with the death and resurrection of my Lord — yes, I must 
participate in both. The putting away of the sin and guilt of humanity, 
which was the essential feature of Jesus' work, must take place in me; and 
this I must do by having my life incorporated with his life, so that his 
mighty life within lifts me out of the dominion of sin and death into his own 
region of life and peace. It was humanity that bore the curse in his death, 
and all the true life of humanity rose from the dead in his resurrection. 
Now if I am united to him and participate in this new humanity of which 
he is the head, I may take for mine not only all that Jesus has done, but all 
that Jesus is. In other words, my union with Christ must result in a change 
within me; and I can never be saved unless I so appropriate the death and 
resurrection of the Lord Jesus that there results within me a corresponding 
death to sin and resurrection to holiness. 

Let me illustrate what I mean by a curious tract which I once saw. It 
was entitled: "The Seven Togethers." It was nothing more nor less than 
a combination and exposition of seven remarkable passages with regard to 
the union of the believer with Christ. These "seven togethers" are seven 
links of a golden chain that binds us indissolubly to the Redeemer. They 
are: 1st, Crucified together with Christ; 2dly, Quickened together with 
Christ; 3dly, Raised together with Christ; 4thly, Seated together with 
Christ in heavenly places ; 5thly, Sufferers together with Christ ; Gthly, Heirs 
together with Christ; 7thly, Glorified together with Christ. In these Scrip- 
ture phrases Is the whole essence of the Gospel ; for it is nothing else than 
union with a personal living Christ that saves us, a union with him by faith, 



THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 235 

such that what he has done in the past becomes ours, and we know In the 
present "the fellowship of his sufferings, and the power of his resurrection, 
being made conformable unto his death." And this great truth of salvation 
for all, upon the simple condition of uniting themselves to Jesus by faith, I 
see set forth in the baptism of Jesus. I see not Jesus only, going down 
into the grave and coming up a conqueror, but myself also — yes, and every 
believer, too — giving to death the body of the sins of the flesh, and rising 
in him to life and glory. 

Finally, we should see in this transaction a picture of the duty of those 
who have believed in Jesus. To all such there comes the obligation to pro- 
fess his name before men. And in what way should they profess his name? 
If what has been said is true, then the entrance of the soul into the com- 
munion of Christ's death and resurrection should be signified to the world 
by a baptism like his. Nothing but the total immersion of the body in water 
will answer the design of the ordinance, on the one hand, because nothing 
else can symbolize the greatness and radical nature of the change effected in 
regeneration — a change from spiritual death to spiritual life. Nothing else 
will answer the design of the ordinance, on the other hand, because nothing 
else can set forth the fact that this change from spiritual death to spiritual 
life is connected with and wholly dependent upon the death and resurrection 
of Jesus. We owe all to Christ's work for us. Is it too much that we 
should signify this obligation in the symbol by which we declare our change 
to the world? 

Just here is the reason why we cannot alter the form of the ordinance. 
We cannot alter it, because we cannot take out of it its reference to the death 
and resurrection of Jesus, and to our spiritual death and resurrection with 
him. As Jesus' baptism pointed forward to his death and resurrection, so 
the baptism of the believer points backward to the same. And wheresoever 
baptism is administered, whether by John the Baptist, or by the apostles, 
or by the later ministers of Christ's church, it points evermore to that great 
central fact of the Christian scheme, that one death by which we live, the 
death of the God-man for the sins of the world. Thus "it becomes us" 
also "to fulfill all righteousness," first, by dying to sin in spirit and rising 
to a new life of penitence and faith, and then by symbolizing our depend- 
ence upon Christ's death and our consecration to a life like this, by following 
in his footsteps who was buried by John beneath the waters of the Jordan. 
The course which the Savior took is the course for those who profess to fol- 
low him, for "the servant is not above his Master, neither the disciple above 
his Lord." 

In this common reference to the death of Christ we have the link which 
binds the two ordinances of Christ's church together. They both and equally 
are symbols of the death of Christ. In baptism we show forth the death of 
Christ as the procuring cause of our new birth into the kingdom of God. 
In the Lord's Supper we show forth the death of Christ as the sustaining 
power of our spiritual life after that life has once begun. In the ordinance 
of baptism we honor the regenerating power of the death of Christ, as in the 
Lord's Supper we honor its sanctifying power. Thus both the ordinances 
are parts of one whole — setting before us Christ's death for men, in its two 
great purposes and results. The two ordinances combined constitute a 



23G THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 

double monument to the historical fact of Jesus' death for the sins of the 
world. As the children of an Israelitish family, gathered at the Passover 
festival, asked of the father, who sat at the head of the hoard, the question : 
"What mean ye by this service?" and the father answered: "It is the 
sacrifice of the Lord's Passover," thus handing down to the coming genera- 
tion the memory of the great deliverance which God had wrought in old 
time for their nation, so now the world asks and the church explains what 
she means by this double service of Baptism and the Lord's Supper. And 
her answer, according to the Scriptures, must evermore be this, that in these 
two ordinances, she preserves a symbol of that great historical fact of her 
own past deliverance through the shedding of Christ's blood. To change 
the form of the ordinance of baptism is to break down a mighty monument 
to the great central fact of the Gospel — to break down a monument which 
God himself has set up, that it may witness to all the world that Christ has 
died to save it. A form that signifies purification simply, is not sufficient. 
Baptism symbolizes purification, indeed, but purification in a peculiar and 
divine way, namely, through the death of Christ and the entrance of the 
soul into communion with that death. The radical defect of sprinkling or 
pouring as a mode of administering the ordinance is this, that it does not 
point to Christ's death as the procuring cause of our purifcation. In bap- 
tism we are bound to show forth the Lord's death as the original source of 
holiness and life in our souls, just as in the Lord's Supper we are bound to 
show forth the Lord's death as the source of all nourishment and strength 
after this life of holiness has once begun. To substitute for the broken 
bread and poured-out wine of the Communion some form of administration 
which leaves out all reference to the death of Christ, would be to destroy 
the Lord's Supper, and to celebrate an ordinance of human invention. And 
in like manner, to substitute for Baptism any form of administration which 
excludes all symbolic reference to the death of Christ, is to destroy that 
ordinance. Without immersion, you have baptism no longer, but an ordi- 
nance of human invention. It is for this reason that we stand for baptism 
in its integrity — not because of the form itself, but for the sake of the 
unspeakably important truth which the form embodies ; not for the sake of 
indulging private preference or fancy, but that the church may witness con- 
tinuously and consistently, in her ordinances as well as in her preaching, to 
that truth which constitutes the soul of her soul and the life of her life. 

I have somewhere read that the mortar which cements the stones of the 
great mosque of St. Sophia, at Constantinople, still retains the fragance of 
the musk that was mingled with it when Justinian built the edifice in the sixth 
century as a temple of the Lord. The infidel Turk has captured and spoiled 
it; the worship of Christ has given place to the religion of Mohammed; 
the cross has been humbled, and the crescent seems to utter over it from 
year to year a silent and symbolic boast of growth and conquest ; yet still a 
keen sense can discern exhaling from the very substance of the structure the 
imperishable aroma of that early devotion that counted the costliest perfumes 
none too precious to enrich and sanctify the house of God. The ordinance 
of baptism is like the church Justinian built, — the fragant spices of Jesus' 
burial are wrought into its very structure, and yield their perfume from age 
to age. Through all the vicissitudes of Christian history, its due adminis- 



THE BAPTISM OP JESUS. 237 

tration is a visible witness and memorial of the death of Christ, a proof even 
to the senses of that matchless love that endured the agony and bloody 
sweat, the cross and passion, and that went down into the darkness of the 
sepulchre that it might "open the kingdom of heaven to all believers." 
Wonderful symbol ! combining in one picture all the essential truths of the 
Christian scheme, expressing not only the fact of death to sin, and resurrec- 
tion to righteousness, but also the method of that fact — through the union 
of our souls with a dying and a risen Savior ! Let this ordinance in which 
the believer follows his Master's example of consecration be forever sacred 
to us. Let us preserve it in its integrity, as the Lord has delivered it to us. 
Witnessing it, may we ever find it an encouragement to hope and an incite- 
ment to duty. And as the life and death of Jesus answered to the conse- 
cration which he made on the banks of Jordan, so let our lives witness that 
at our baptism we truly died to sin and rose to newness of life ! 



XIX. 
CHRISTIAN TRUTH AM) ITS KEEPERS." 



I have seen it stated that the origin of the American Baptist Publication 
Society was due to a circumstance as simple as that falling of the apple 
from the tree which revealed to Newton the law of gravitation. The falling 
of a little tract from the hat of the Rev. Samuel Cornelius suggested to Noah 
Davis the idea of a General Tract Society, that should fill the land with a 
trenchant and succinct denominational literature. It might almost seem 
that Mr. Darwin's doctrine of "pangenesis" had found an illustration here, 
and that this cellule of an idea contained the germs of the whole subsequent 
structure of this society. I have no notion, however, that either its begin- 
nings or its after-work can be explained by any mere law of natural develop 
ment. There are such things as new creations, not only in geologic history 
but in the history of the church, and I believe that the starting of this 
society into life was one of those new creations. I attribute its origin, not 
to Noah Davis, who saw the tract fall, nor to Samuel Cornelius, from whose 
hat it fell, but rather to that all-working Providence which in every century 
and through agencies utterly insufficient of themselves, summons new moral 
forces into being to further the progress of his truth. And if this be their 
origin, then we may dismiss our fears lest these organizations take from the 
church her honor or her responsibility. They are the appointed servants 
and helpers of the church, — when they work, it is the church that works 
through them, — all their glory is the glory of the church. My only fear is 
that we forget that these societies hold their commission from God, that 
they have been raised up as bulwarks and defenses of his truth, and that the 
demands they make upon us are the demands of Christ himself. I ask your 
attention to certain considerations which vindicate the claims of this society 
for help in its great work of furnishing a cheap denominational literature. 
I maintain that the work of propagating our peculiar views of truth is cor- 
rect in principle; that we who hold these views are specially ordained to 
this work; and that the methods of which we make use are demanded in 
these times by a sound Christian expediency. 

The principle upon which our whole work is based is nothing more nor 
less than this : Christ's truth is an organic whole, all whose parts have vital 
connections with each other, so that to stand for any one part of the great 
system is logically to stand for every other part, — to harm any part is to do 
injury to the whole. We all know something of the organic unity of the 
human body. Suppose a man comes to me and asks me to let him cut oft* 
one joint of my finger, on the ground that it is a very small part of my body 



* An address delivered before the American Baptist Publication Society, 
at its annual meeting in New York City, May, 1868. 

238 



CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND ITS KEEPERS. 



239 



and that its loss will not be felt, — you would think him crazy, and you would 
think me crazier still to grant his request. To tear one joint from my finger 
Is to maim the whole body, and send horrible pains through every part. 
God's truth is an organic whole like a human body. Injure it in any one 
part, however insignificant, and you injure the whole, you sap the life-blood, 
the blow is felt at the very heart. Just as the law of God is the expression 
of the will of the One Lawgiver, and therefore he who offends in one part is 
guilty of all, so Christian doctrine is a reflection of the being and nature of 
the God of truth, and he who denies or hides any part of it, however small, 
is, just so far, bringing the Sun of Righteousness into disastrous eclipse. 
and destroying the symmetry and power of God's revelation of himself to 
men. 

Now we believe that our distinctive denominational tenets are part and 
parcel of this truth of God, and as such are built Into the very frame-work 
of Christianity so that they cannot be torn away without injury to the whole 
structure. Tho.se grand principles for which our fathers contended even 
unto death — the sole authority of the word of God, the freedom of con- 
science from all civil domination, the admission of none but baptized 
believers to the membership and ordinances of the church, the right of 
every member of the church to a voice in its government and discipline, — 
these principles are not only logically inseparable from one another, but are 
organically connected with the whole body of revealed truth. Even that 
tenet of our faith, that nothing is baptism but the immersion of the believer 
in water in the name of the Trinity, is linked in organic unity to every other 
part of the Christian scheme. And as this may illustrate what I mean by 
the organic unity of revealed truth, let me ask you to give a moment's 
reflection to the relations of baptism, first, to Christian doctrine as a whole 
and then to the other ordinance of Christ's house, the Holy Supper. 

Baptism is not a meaningless ceremonial — it symbolizes the great central 
truth of the gospel — in its very form it represents a death, burial and resur- 
rection. "Whose death," do you ask? The death of Christ, I answer, and 
the entrance of the believer into communion with that death. We see the 
death of Christ set forth as clearly and powerfully in Baptism as in the Holy 
Supper. Baptism signifies purification indeed, but purification only in a 
peculiar and divine way, namely, through the death of Christ and our per- 
sonal communion with that death by faith. It is said that in the last century, 
every rope, great or small, that was used throughout the British navy, had 
a scarlet thread running through it from end to end ; lost, stolen, sunk 
beneath the waves though it might be, the smallest vestige of the cordage 
showed by this simple thread that it bore the King's mark and was the pos- 
session of the crown. So there is a scarlet thread running through the 
whole circle of Christian doctrine and practice certifying that all its different 
parts are one. It is the scarlet thread of the blood of Jesus. That scarlet 
thread runs through the ordinance of Baptism — that reference to Jesus' 
death reveals to us its divine significance — that emblematic declaration that 
even the beginnings of spiritual life must have their source in the fountain 
of Jesus' blood, vindicates its place and importance as an indispensable part 
of Christian doctrine and practice, and gives it all its glory as the initiatory 
ordinance of the Christian church. But this it not all. Baptism not only 



240 CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND ITS KEEPERS. 

sets forth with all the vividness of sign-language the great central truth of 
the gospel, but other related truths find expression there as well. That 
sacred ordinance is nothing less indeed than a pictorial representation of the 
whole substance of Christianity, an incarnation in symbol of all the essential 
truths upon which our salvation hangs, a mirroring forth in visible form of 
the great invisible realities of atonement through Jesus' death, regeneration 
by the power of the Spirit, union with Christ by a living faith, resurrection 
with Christ to a new lift here and eternal glory hereafter. Thus Baptism is 
bound up in the organic unity of the Christian scheme. To defend Christ's 
ordinance from abuse and perversion is not to preach a partial and sectarian 
gospel, but to stand for the whole system of doctrine which that ordinance 
sets forth and illustrates. To substitute anything for Baptism which excludes 
all reference to the death of Christ is to falsify the whole body of Christian 
truth and break down one of the grand safeguards of Christian doctrine. 

Observe, too, how this reference of Baptism unites it by a living tie to 
that other ordinance of Christ's house, the Holy Supper. We know the 
tenacity with which all branches of the Christian church hold to the sym- 
bolism of the Communion. There is a so-called Protestant church in this 
city where the eucharist is weekly celebrated by the light of blazing candles, 
while incense and procession and genuflexion lend their meretricious attrac- 
tions to an ordinance which was meant to commemorate the Savior's death, 
but which has come to be little else than a piece of Romish idolatry. Yet 
if you were to suggest to these ritualistic Christians that they might substi- 
tute for the broken bread and poured-out wine of the communion, some 
other form of administering the ordinance which would leave out all refer- 
ence to the death of Christ, even they, with all their forgetfulness of its real 
spirit, would start back iu horror of the sacrilege, because in that sacred 
ordinance they see compacted all the creed, and hold themselves specially 
commissioned to maintain it inviolate forever, as a visible witness for the 
central truths of the gospel. To celebrate the Holy Supper in any form 
which obscures to popular apprehension the mighty sacrifice it was meant to 
commemorate, is to celebrate not the Holy Supper but some ordinance of 
human invention. But who has authorized us to empty one ordinance of its 
meaning, any more than the other? Even the High Churchman can appreciate 
the shock which the Christian faith would sustain, if all reference to the 
death of Christ were taken out of the Communion, for it would be equivalent 
to declaring that Christian life could be preserved and nourished apart from 
that one death by which alone we live. But is it any the less a wrong to the 
whole body of truth to assert in symbol that Christian life and purity can 
begin in the soul without having its source in the death of Christ? Yet this 
is done whenever anything is substituted for baptism which cannot set forth 
a burial with Christ. The one ordinance is as sacred as the other — both 
are bound together by their common reference to the death of Jesus. Like 
those twins of whom old Hippocrates wrote, one life and breath seems to 
animate both, one blood pulsates through their veins, they smile and weep 
together, their minds are united in electric sympathies, when one suffers the 
other suffers with it, when one dies, the same hour witnesses the death of 
the other also. Let baptism degenerate into a half-mystical, half-magical 
rite, void of all allusion to the sacrifice on Calvary, and administered to 



CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND ITS KEEPERS. 241 

those whose infantile years preclude all conscious communion by faith with 
the Savior's death, and you have not far to go to see the perversion of the 
Lord's Supper into a sensuous accessory of ritualistic worship by which in 
some cabalistic way the communicant is manipulated into the kingdom of 
heaven, and made partaker of the blessings promised only to the believer. 
Regard for the integrity of the Lord's Supper, as well as for the great sum 
of truth of which these two ordinances are constituent parts and appointed 
emblems, urges us to keep the ordinance of Baptism as it was first delivered 
to the church, a living symbol of the death of Christ, and of our entrance 
into communion with that death by faith. 

But I am asked, what peculiar responsibility have we as Baptists, more 
than others, in upholding and propagating our distinctive views? Let me 
reply briefly to this question by laying down a second principle, of as great 
practical importance as that first one with regard to the organic unity of 
Christian truth. It is this : — Christ has committed special truths of his 
great system to special keepers. It has been so through the whole history 
of man. Both civilization and religion have gone out from centres. Rev- 
elation was first given to a historic nation, that from them it might be dis- 
seminated through the world. And in this is the wisdom of God. There 
were two possible plans, — one to give the knowledge of himself in discon- 
nected parts, to individuals isolated and scattered here and there over the 
globe, — the other to make the revelation in a fix^d place, to one people anr] 
with historic connection and unity. Any one can see that the last is better 
than the first, just as the introduction of a new variety of wheat could be 
better effected by planting it at first in a single field, than by scattering 
single grains of it here and there over the surface of the world, and thus 
running the risk of total choking-out and extinction. Just as God has made 
the great fundamental truths of religion to go out from Judasa and her now 
stricken and desolate race, so he has made some single branches of his 
church the special interpreters and defenders of single portions of his truth, 
and has laid on them the charge of keeping the light of those special truths 
burning before the nations. 

I am not one of those who are in anguish of spirit over the multiplicity 
of sects. Mere unity of external organization may be a deceit and a snare, 
as the palmy days of the Roman hierarchy may witness. The only unity 
worth striving for is that unity in the truth, which the Spirit of God, dwel- 
ling in all true believers, is working out in the course of the church's his- 
tory. But that unity in the faith to which we all shall ultimately come is to 
be promoted only by the fidelity of each body of Christians to the truth a c j 
they apprehend it. God's word is a field in which many a treasure still lies 
hid. When any man or set of men gets hold of a truth that has been hitherto 
neglected, and finds it full of power and life, the natural tendency, yes, the 
providential design, is that the new spirit should take to itself a new form, 
and through a new outward organization, impress upon the world its import-: 
ance and its claims. Christianity is many-sided ; there is a possibility that 
another, looking at Christ's truth from a different point of vifew, may embrace 
within the circuit of his vision something which I cannot see. God bless 
him in his efforts to make it known to men I Single Christians and single 
16 



242 CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND ITS KEEPERS. 

churches are but partial illustrators and reflectors of the mighty truths of 
the Bible, — 

" Hither, as to a fountain, 
Other suns repair, and in their urns 
Draw golden light." 

But as the one colorless light, falling upon different objects, loses a part 
of its rays by absorption, and only blue, red, green or some other color, is 
reflected to us, so the one light of truth, reflected from different Christian 
bodies, loses it whiteness, — a part of the truth is lost in the transmission, 
another part is made too prominent, it may be, — all the rays of all the sects 
together, and not of one alone, make up the pure white light of Christian 
doctrine; and though we cannot understand the truths which many of these 
sects are striving to represent, though we have no mental chemistry which 
can now combine them, we may rejoice that all these scattered rays shall at 
last be reunited and form a circlet of glory round the Redeemer's brow. 

For this very reason, therefore, that Christ has given to us certain definite 
convictions which differ from the views of others, are we bound to be faith- 
ful to those convictions, and to contend for them until we die, — our ray of 
truth is a part at least of Christ's light,— one element will be lacking if we 
hide that ray or put it. out. Let it shine ! Let it shine, and do its work for 
God, like the lighthouse on some rocky coast, lighting the track of safety 
to thousands of souls storm-tost and bewildered on the great ocean of con- 
troversy and speculation. The world needs that light; God has made us its 
keepers ; from us it must go forth, if it is to enlighten the nations. Let us 
not imagine that truth of itself will win its way to victory and universal 
acceptation. Truth, without a body of believers to hold it forth, and a divine 
Spirit to make that exhibition effectual, is an abstraction and not a power. 
The cross that caps the dome of St. Peter's could never look down from its 
lofty height upon the myriad roofs of the eternal city, if it were not for those 
gigantic piers far beneath, which Bramante built up in the sixteenth century 
from the primeval rock. So there is no truth of revelation that has power 
to hold itself in mid-air alone. The church of the living God has been ap- 
pointed to be its pillar and ground ; its very historical existence as Christian 
truth rests on this, that there remains from age to age a company of devoted 
souls who give themselves to the work of sustaining and preserving it. For 
this purpose of upholding a portion of Christ's truth, long neglected and 
despised, God has given us our being as a separate Christian organization. 
If it be not our duty to use all lawful means for the support and propagation 
of our faith, then our very denominational existence is an impertinence, and 
our boasted truth is only schism and heresy. But if, on the other hand, we 
have built up our denominational faith upon the everlasting rock of God's 
revealed will, then to give up one inch of our position for the sake of liber- 
ality, or worldly repute, or wider influence, is simply to give up Christ and 
in that thing to deny him. To every taunting charge of bigotry, we can 
only answer as Peter and John answered of old: "Whether it be right, in 
the sight of God, to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For 
we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard." God bas 
appointed that those who believe should speak, and that through their 
speaking the truth which he has committed to them should bring forth 



CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND ITS KEEPERS. 



243 



fruit after its kind, until the world shall be covered with the waving 
harvest. 

I have but one other thought to present, and that is that Christ requires 
us, in the propagation of his truth, to adopt modern measures for modern 
needs. We must not only defend the points which are most attacked, but 
must defend them by means suited to the emergency. In the Arabian 
Nights, there is a strange story of an evil Afrite whom a king's daughter 
sought to destroy. Perceiving her purpose, the Genie put forth his magic 
power and changed his shape into that of a roaring lion. But the princess 
possessed equal powers of enchantment. Plucking a single hair from her 
waving locks, she turned it in a instant into a glittering sword, and with the 
sword she cleft her adversary in twain. But the lion's head still had life, and 
ere she was aware it had become a deadly scorpion. Then she herself became 
a serpent to pursue him. But he was a scorpion no longer; transformed 
into an eagle, he was soaring far beyond her reach. Then she followed him 
in the shape of a vulture. Metamorphosed into a fish, he found himself 
chased by a shark, whose form was only the disguise of bis relentless foe. 
Reduced at length to the last resource of despair, he turned into a flame of 
fire, but his enemy became a greater flame and devoured him. It is an 
illustration of the protean forms which error assumes, in its conflicts with 
the truth, and of the vigilance and flexibility with which truth must adapt 
her weapons of attack to each of them. 

Of all the auxiliaries of error, there is none which for power can compare 
with the modern press. Truth must arm herself with the same weapon, if 
she would counteract its influence and take possession of its strongholds, 
— like David, she must take Goliath's own sword to behead the giant. But 
why do I speak as if the church were taking the weapon of another, when 
she used the press? It is her own, by right divine. The printing of the 
Bible consecrated it to God forever. Without it, the Reformation would 
have died in its cradle. It is one of those diversities of operations by which 
the Spirit, in his sevenfold energy, is renewing the face of the world. In the 
religious literature of the day, we see some glimpses of its power. Who can 
estimate what it will be in coming days, when history and poetry, science 
and fiction, shall all become the handmaids of religion, and each shall count 
it the highest aim of her ambition to receive the laurel from the hand of 
Christ ! 

It is the part of a true Christian expediency to bring the press to bear upon 
those peculiar errors which to our view mar the symmetry of modern Chris- 
tianity, and hinder the progress of the gospel among men. We are confirmed 
in this belief by the wondrous blessing which, under God, has attended the 
printing and dissemination of our denominational literature. What one of 
us can look at Sweden with its two hundred churches established, and its 
seven thousand souls converted to God, without rejoicing that a publication 
of this society led Andreas Wiberg to devote to Baptist missionary work the 
energies of a consecrated soul ! Witness the mighty progress of pure relig- 
ion in Germany. See the fifteen thousand baptized believers who labor 
there for Christ, and then remember that the single grain of seed-corn from 
which this vast harvest sprang was a little tract of the American Baptist 
Publication Society, which led Dr. Oncken thirty-four years ago to embrace 






244 CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND ITS KEEPERS 

Scriptural views of Baptism. And who can tell how many thousands, once 
dead in trespasses and sins, have read the tracts of this society, and reading 
them have seemed to touch the bones of some dead prophet, and to be raised 
thereby to new spiritual life. And this, my friends, is the work your Society 
is doing. Day by day and year by year, it is sending forth its leaves for the 
healing of the nations. Through its Sabbath school and tract departments 
it is reaching thousands upon thousands whom you and I will never see, 
spreading everywhere the knowledge of Christ and of his commandments. 
Like the foraminifera, those microscopic "toilers of the sea," — each one 
so small that a hundred and fifty of them, strung together end to end, would 
form a line only a twelfth of an inch in length, but which, with all their 
littleness, built up in the geologic ages the enormous masses of the Wealdeu 
chalk, and stretches of limestone rock, hundreds of miles in extent and 
thousands of feet in thickness, — these little publications which singly 
seem so insignificant, sent forth and scattered broadcast through the land, 
are building up whole continents of truth, and laying foundation for the 
future which no after storms or cataclysms can ever wear away. 

Into this work, then, let us put our strength of money and of heart. We 
have no iron wheel of outward organization, revolving at the bidding of some 
central despotism, to fill our treasury. Let us demonstrate that the voluntary 
offerings of Christian love will accomplish more than forced levies can. Let 
us show that we value our principles, by our zeal and liberality in diffusing 
them. And while we stand faithful to Christ, and to the truth as he has 
revealed it to us, let us not fail to adopt for our own the reputed maxim of 
the noble Persians — ever to speak of our opponents in controversy with 
heartfelt acknowledgment of all that God has wrought in them of good, 
—for, after all, the differences which separate us are far less important than 
the ties that bind us together ; though we cannot now in all things see alike, 
we may still rejoice in the inheritance which we possess, as children of one 
common Father ; though the bars of outward organization render our union 
imperfect here, we may look forward with all the more of longing to that 
time when all these divisions of the twilight shall disappear in the sunrise of 
a fuller knowledge, and it shall be known to all the universe at last that 
there is but "one flock and one Shepherd." 



XX. 

UNCONSCIOUS ASSUMPTIONS OF COMMUNION 
POLEMICS.* 



It Is often the serious misfortune of able and honest men, that they unwit- 
tingly argue upon principles which, when formally stated, they would 
unhesitatingly repudiate. Many attempts to construct new roads through 
the tangled wilds of the Communion controversy only result in the discov- 
ery of the old open-communion thoroughfare ; and the rejoicing of those 
who make the discovery is partly attributable to the novelty of their situa- 
tion, and to the fact that they have not yet followed the road through, to its 
disagreeable and unscriptural terminus. The best service that can be ren- 
dered to such as have thus lost their way, and have perchance led others 
into the same error, is to show by map and compass that they are journey- 
ing in a wrong direction, and that the path they travel conducts them to a 
very different point from that which they seek. 

The first of the unconscious assumptions that underlie the arguments 
to which we allude is this, that the practice of the churches is a sort of com- 
mon law which, when codified, may supplement or qualify the law of the New 
Testament. It is true that, in some professedly Baptist churches, the ancient 
principles of the denomination are not carried out with absolute logical con- 
sistency. In certain churches, there is a growing tendency to pass lightly 
over the question of communion-faith in their admission of members, and to 
refrain from discipline in cases where members practice occasional commun- 
ion with churches not of our faith and order. We have sometimes known 
instances where orthodox Baptist deacons have not refused the bread and 
wine to Pedo-baptist brethren who took upon themselves the responsibility of 
remaining at an ordinary celebration of the Lord's Supper. These and sundry 
other irregular and exceptional cases convince our critics that the old bottles 
of ancient law are not strong enough or large enough to hold the new wine 
of Christian enlightenment and charity. They therefore proceed to elevate 
practice itself into law — to make irregularity its own voucher — to legalize 
license — to turn permission under sufferance into acknowledgment of fun- 
damental right. 

It scarcely needs to be pointed out that this is a method the reverse of 
scientific, evangelical, or Baptist. Here is unconsciously assumed the 
fundamental principle of all unprotestant ecclesiasticism — the principle 
that not only God, but man also, makes law; that the church, equally with 
the Scriptures, is the standard of appeal in questions of duty ; and that the 
analogy of faith is to be looked to as a primary source of truth, instead of 



Printed in The Examiner, Jan. 21, li 
245 



24G UNCONSCIOUS ASSUMPTIONS. 

being a secondary source, of value only when it corroborates conclusions 
drawn directly and at first hand from the word of God. How far such a 
principle as this might lead, history furnishes sufficient witness. When 
stated in words, it would be rejected with marked energy by some who are 
dissatisfied with our common practice. This proves without doubt that 
they will not speedily go over to Presbyterianism or to Rome, but it does 
not make it any the less certain that their method is fatally incorrect, and 
that this seeking for the law in human custom and observance, instead of 
conforming human custom and observance to the law, would slowly, perhaps, 
but surely, work the ruin of the church of Christ. 

But is there an original, all-comprehending, all-compelling law? Ah, that 
is the question ! When our new guides speak of an authoritative order of 
the ordinances, we can hardly avoid believing that they have some just 
notion of a divine prescription which makes the yea and nay of men of little 
account in the comparison. But there is no explaining the conclusions at 
which they arrive, without allowing that there is a second underlying as- 
sumption equally erroneous with the first, — this, namely, that there is no 
fixed, complete and binding system of church organization revealed in the 
New Testament. It is possible to hold to an authority which is merely the 
authority of rational order. It is possible to believe in a merely germinal 
New Testament church. It is possible to urge the obligatoriness of church 
ordinances upon grounds of expediency. Our friends do not do this. But 
when they urge that impulse may break over this order, and that faith is 
above law, we seem to see the unconscious influence of some development- 
theory of the church, that gives to the free spirit power to mould and shape 
Christ's ordinances, or to dispense with them at its will. 

There are two logical theories, and two only. Either the law of Christ is 
adequate, or it is not. Either men may change it, or they may not. Either 
the New Testament furnishes us with the model of the church, or it does 
not. If it does, then there are no exceptions to its rule, — a divine law is 
far-seeing, and needs no change. Upon this ground the Baptist brotherhood 
have stood, and do stand. But there is other ground, not so Scriptural, but 
yet logically consistent with itself. It is the ground that there is no definite 
or adequate model of church-organization in the New Testament — at least, 
none that binds the conscience and practice of the church through all time. 
Upon this theory, a man may unite himself to the Christian church and sub- 
mit to her ordinances, according as he finds it expedient or convenient. 
Truth in this matter is entirely subjective. The church, like an ox-yoke, is 
useful, — when its apparent usefulness ceases, let it go. The Christian's 
individual relation to Christ, this is the only real and binding thing. 
Churches are chance assemblages of believers. Church organization ex- 
presses no living truth, — let it follow the customs of the times or the 
inclination of the moment. Church government, — let it be autocratic in 
Italy, democratic in America, and double-headed in Japan. God has planned 
a gospel for all men, but he has not planned a church. And then, if the 
New Testament is not a sufficient authority for practice, what reason is then; 
to believe that it is a sufficient authority for doctrine? 

Shall we be Plymouth Brethren, or shall we be Baptists? Either one of 
the two we can be, and preserve some show of logical consistency. But to 



OF COMMUNION POLEMICS. 247 

be both at once, — that is a riding of two horses which is not only difficult, 
but for any length of time impossible to a thinking man. And why should 
we attempt impossible tasks? We have such a thing as church organization 
in the New Testament. There are specifled qualifications for membership; 
tbere are stated meetings; there are regularly elected officers; there is a 
custom sanctioned and an order enjoined by the apostles; there are ordi- 
nances delivered to the care of the church ; there are letters and contributions 
and registers ; there is common work to be done ; there is common discipline 
to be exercised, — what more do we need to constitute a thorough organiza- 
tion? And if Christ's promise was fulfilled, and the divine Spirit led the 
Apostles into all truth, in their church-teaching and church-building, then 
what right have we to admit exceptions to the acknowledged order of God's 
house? Our rights in such an organization are not rights — they are only 
privileges, whose enjoyment is conditioned upon obedience ; and faith car- 
ries with it the privilege of Communion, only as it implies obedience to all 
things which Christ has commanded. 

But let us come to a third assumption, — still remembering that none of 
these are acknowledged or could be in words — for they are too baldly false 
for any Baptist openly to acknowledge. It is an assumption, nevertheless, 
without which the fabric of the new doctrine would topple over for sheer 
one-sidedness. It is this : The ordinances are purely formal and external, 
instead of being living expressions of the inmost realities of the Christian 
faith. Some such postulate as this must be supposed, before we can com- 
prehend such statements as that the ritual is so subordinate to the spiritual, 
lhat no ritual deficiencies can justly prevent the exercise of so called spirit- 
ual rights. By what strange confusion is it possible to demand ceremonial 
privileges without ceremonial qualifications? Only by forgetting that all 
ritual of God's appointment is profoundly spiritual, and that disorder in 
ritual falsifies the truth which the ritual was ordained to symbolize and 
represent. Why do we hold so strenuously to the duty and privilege of 
Christian baptism? Because of the meaning of a Greek word, or an aesthetic 
fancy for a form? God forbid! We hold to baptism, because it is the 
divinely appointed vehicle and symbol of the great central truth of the 
Christian scheme — the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and 
our death to sin and resurrection to new life in him. Why do we hold to 
the invariable precedence of Baptism to the Supper? Because the ordinance 
which symbolizes regeneration must go before the ordinance which symbol- 
izes sanctification, as birth must go before nourishment, and life before its 
sustenance. Instead of being void of doctrinal significance, these ordinances 
and their order are doctrines incarnate. Give up immersion, and you destroy 
one great memorial of the Savior's death and of the radical change which, 
by communion with that death, is wrought in every believing soul. Alter 
the order of the ordinances — grant that men are qualified to partake of the 
Lord's Supper without Baptism, and you teach the world that men may be 
sanctified without regeneration ; that there can be a holy life without the 
new-creating power of God. 

And so the depreciation of the ritual leads to a denial of the spiritual. 
For the sake of the spiritual we must hold to the ritual. We are as far from 
believing in a special sacramental grace, communicated after some outward 



248 UNCONSCIOUS ASSUMPTIONS. 

fashion through the ordinances, as any Swiss Reformer ever was. But all 
the more sacred do the ordinances and their appointed order seem to us, 
when we remember that their only power is the power they exert as monu- 
mental symbols of the saving truth of God. To change them, or to permit 
their change without protest, is more than to give up a form; it is to strike 
a blow at the very heart of the Christian faith. For this reason it seems to 
us that the indirect apology for violations of the Scriptural order to which 
we have alluded, and the suggestion that impulse and sentiment may justify 
a Christian in overriding that order, can have no other foundation than an 
unconscious assumption that Christ's ordinances are, like some human ordi- 
nances, mere matters of form, instead of being what they are, full of spirit 
and life. 

A last assumption which we must notice is, that the laissez faire, or let- 
alone principle, will ensure the downfall of error, and the peace and progress 
of the church. There are a multitude of quiet brethren who, like Erasmus, 
deplore so great strife about matters so small. Alas, that we should And 
some of our own brethren among those who count the difference between 
truth and error, even in the matter of the ordinances, unworthy of the bar- 
ing of their swords! Let them deplore it as they will, yet they cannot 
ignore the fact that the battle would never have raged for centuries 
around these ordinances, if they had not been the symbols of God's 
truth and the banners of the church. It is because the family, the 
State and the church are divine in their origin, that they are so constantly 
attacked by errorists of every sort. It is because they are endangered, that 
the ordinances are delivered to the church as a trust to be guarded for her 
Lord. Nothing will take care of itself in this degenerate world — least of 
all, moral and religious truth. The church is its pillar and ground, — if she 
fail to support it and hold it forth before the world, the truth will go down. 
As to this specific matter of the order of the ordinances, history negatives 
the notion that Baptism can maintain itself when the church admits the 
unbaptized to her communion. If spiritual union with Christ justifies us in 
coming to the table without Baptism, it equally justifies in coming into the 
church without Baptism — it equally justifies any and every neglect, any 
and every sin. The religion of sentiment has many a sad illustration in 
individual transgression. Let the church as a body accept the religion of 
sentiment, instead of the warrior spirit that gives battle rather than yield 
one inch of truth, and the serpent she was to have trodden beneath her feet 
will strangle her within his folds. 

We have a better hope for the church than this — a better hope for our 
Baptist churches. They have grown to be many and strong, by faithfulness 
to their convictions. They will grow in future, not by disobeying the organic 
law of their constitution, nor by welcoming those who disobey it, but by 
keeping the ordinances as they were first delivered. Upon the assumptions 
we have mentioned, no proper keeping of the ordinances upon the part of 
the church is possible. She is to set the table for all who choose to come. 
She is to baptize without question all who present themselves. If any 
theory could be devised which would more quickly merge the church in the 
world, and turn the Holy Place of the Temple into a Court of the Gentiles, 
we Know not what it is. Nor is the simple maintenance of the Scriptural 



OF COMMUNION POLEMICS. 249 

order, as we understand it, Ritualism or Ecclesiastic-ism or Pharisaism. We 
pass no judgment upon the honesty of Christians of other names. We do 
not deny to their organizations the title of churches. But we do hold that 
they are churches irregularly constituted, and that their celebration of the 
Lord's Supper is a defective one, because they have not obeyed Christ's 
ordinance of Baptism. We give them fellowship in all else, but we can- 
not give them fellowship in their church-order and communion without 
stultifying ourselves, and proclaiming our own denominational existence to 
be impertinence and schism. Nay, we cannot withhold our protest against 
these irregularities without being false to Christ and his truth, and imperil- 
ing the whole future of his church. 

Necessity knows no law, and David ate the shew-bread without disrespect 
to the Jewish ritual. But impulse and the yearning spirit are under law to 
Christ. Our love is to abound in knowledge and in all judgment. Because 
the Sabbath was made for man, we have no warrant for unnecessary labor 
on that day. That would be to deny that anything was made for man. In 
short, no such necessity is upon us as will justify a breaking over of Christ's 
appointed order. Love will not do it, for love will lead to obedience to the 
Scriptural standards, and even in the pain of sacrificing a ritual enjoyment, 
will find the evidence of its discipleship. and the assurance of greater near- 
ness to the heart of Christ than irregular participation of the Supper can 
ever give. With sorrow we say it — but said it must be — it is the unfaith- 
fulness of our Pedo-baptist brethren to Christ's order that deprives us of the 
privilege of communing with them. We must hold them, and not ourselves, 
responsible for our loss. And we hold any and every attempt to palliate or 
ignore this unfaithfulness, to be not a help to peace but a hindrance ; not a 
contribution to the settlement of differences, but a mere patchwork treaty 
that leaves unnoticed every main question at issue ; not a synthesis of truths 
which, in spite of superficial antagonism, have an inner unity, but a for- 
mulation of essential and irreconcilable contradictions. For this reason we 
have confidence that Baptists will stand for purity, and leave God to 
take care of the peace. Peace will come, not by the love that breaks down 
and overrides organic law, but by the love that holds and holds forth the 
truth. 



XXI. 
THE TEACHER'S GUIDE AXD IIEUER.* 



This word "ministers" does not designate the class of persons whom we 
call preacheis or pastors. It means simply '"servants," "helpers," " pur- 
veyors." In this sense every Christian is a minister, for every Christian is 
a servant of the gospel. I take the text, therefore, as the basis of an address 
to Sabbath school teachers, and in fact to all who are called to instruct the 
young or to exert religious influence over others. All such are set in various 
ways to teach the truth. It is a most serious responsibility. Paul felt it to 
be so in his own case. In the passage that immediately precedes the text, 
he likens his teaching to the perfumes scattered to the air, at the triumphal 
entry of a conqueror. To the victorious soldiery, those floating odors were 
the signs of freedom and reward after the toils of the campaign ; to the 
captives whom they guarded, those same odors were the sign that the time 
had come for them to die. So all teaching of Christian truth is, to those 
who hear it, a savor of life unto life or of death unto death. It makes a 
higher heaven for those who are saved, but a deeper hell for those who 
perish. 

Every earnest teacher will surely echo Paul's own words: "Who is suffi- 
cient for these things?" It is well that he can add as Paul does: "But our 
sufficiency is of God, who has qualified us to be ministers or servants or 
purveyors of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit." It is the 
Holy Spirit of whom Paul speaks. Over against the powerless letter of the 
Old Testament or Covenant, he sees the Spirit of life and power that dis- 
tinguishes the New. To be the ministers or servants of this New Covenant 
is to be the ministers or servants of the Holy Spirit. This is the character- 
istic blessing and strength of every true teacher that he is an assistant or 
helper of the Holy Spirit, qualified for this service by being filled and guided, 
illuminated and energized, by the Holy Spirit whom he serves. 

We are familiar with the thought that the teacher is a minister and serr- 
ant of Christ. We are not so familiar with the thought that the teacher is a 
minister and servant of the Holy Spirit. My object to-day is to show that 
this latter conception of the teacher's vocation is of the greatest doctrinal 
and practical importance. Not only God's methods and nature, but also 
man's ignorance and powerlessness. make it indispensable that the teacher 
should maintain this continuous relation to the Holy Spirit. The text implies 
all this. When it calls the teacher a minister of the Spirit, it Implies two 
things : first, that he is a receiver from God ; and secondly, that he is a com- 



* A sermon preached before the Sunday School Convention, Boston. May 
20. 1ST7. on the text. 2 Cor. 3: 6 — "Able ministers of the New Testament. 
uot of the letter, but of the Spirit." 

250 



THE TEACHER'S GUIDE AND HELPER. 251 

rnunicator to men of what he has received. Let us consider the teacher's 
need of the Holy Spirit from each of these points of view. 

My tirst proposition then is this : that the teacher is wholly dependent upon 
the Holy Spirit, because God's methods and nature are such, that with- 
out the Holy Spirit's working there can be no reception of any spiritual 
blessing from God on the part of the teacher himself. Let us appropriate 
a phrase of recent skepticism to a Christian use. There is "a Power that 
makes for righteousness." That Power is no impersonal abstraction, but 
the personal Holy Spirit. And by this I do not mean that the Holy Spirit 
is simply the invisible presence of Christ. It is more than that. In a true 
sense, the work of the Spirit is a separate one from the work of Christ, and 
we may contrast the two. One feature of the contrast is this : While Christ 
is the organ of external revelation, the Holy Spirit is the organ or agent of 
internal revelation. And we learn what this means, by referring to our own 
inner experience. Christ had come, his cross had been set up, his death 
had been accomplished, his word had proclaimed salvation, but in spite of 
this external revelation we saw nothing in him to attract us. In his cross 
we saw no power to save. The great truths of Christianity were like the 
features of the landscape long before the sun has risen ; mountain and plain 
and stream were there, but they were shrouded in darkness, or only half 
visible through the gloom. But when the Holy Spirit came, with his quick- 
ening power, it was as if, in an instant, that same landscape were flooded 
with the light and radiance of the morning sun. What was before hidden 
or uncertain, now stood out clear and bright and glorious. Mountain and 
plain and stream were there before ; the light did not create, it only revealed 
them. So the Holy Spirit was the sunlight that made real to us the truth 
of Christ — truth which existed before, but which was as hidden from us, as 
if it had not been. Or suppose a blind man led out, in the broad noonday, 
into the centre of that same landscape, — you may describe the beauty of it, 
but to the blind man your description is but empty words. But now, 
imagine that some oculist of surpassing skill could, even while the blind 
man stood there, remove the cataract from his eyes, and perfectly restore 
the sight. At once the whole glory of the scene bursts upon him. So, 
until the Holy Spirit works a change within us, Christ and his truth are hid. 
They are there— eternal verities of God, — but we have no eyes to see them. 
Until the Holy Spirit gives spiritual discernment, and so turns the outer 
word into an inner word, the natural man will never see the truth. 

This illustrates what I mean by saying that the Holy Spirit is the organ 
of internal revelation, while Christ is the organ of external revelation. But 
there is another point of contrast between the work of the Holy Spirit and 
the work of Christ. It is this : While all forth-putting, outgoing activity of 
the Godhead is the work of Christ, the returning movement, the drawing 
back to God, is the work of the Holy Spirit. Consider what this means. 
All forth-putting, outgoing activity of the Godhead is the work of Christ, 
whether it be exhibited in nature, in providence or in redemption. It is he 
through whom the world was created. He upholds and governs all things. 
Gravitation is the expression of his will. History is the marshaling of his 
forces. Incarnation and atonement are his comings into time, and creature- 
ship, and obligation to law. Again I say, all forth-putting, outgoing activ- 



252 THE TEACHERS GUIDE AND HELPER. 

ity of the Godhead is the work of Christ. But on the other hand, the 
refluent wave, the returning movement, the drawing back to God, is the 
work of the Holy Spirit. It is through the eternal Spirit that Christ 
"offered himself without spot to God;" it is by this '•one Spirit" that the 
church throughout the world has "access unto the Father;" it is through 
him that fallen creatures are "convinced of sin," are led to Christ, and are 
brought back to God. All true worship must be offered "'in Spirit and in 
truth." All prayer and service, all aspiration and all life, are normal ami 
noble, and worthy of regard from God or man, only as they are parts or 
results of that great movement of the Holy Spirit, which draws all things 
toward God, their end. 

Go with me yet one step further. We have been speaking of manifesta 
tions, but if the Son and the Holy Spirit are manifestations, they manifest 
something. Their work in time reveals a secret of eternity. The being of 
God is disclosed to us. Christ is the Word, spoken before creatures were, 
and when there was none but God to hear. God expresses himself, and 
knows himself, only through the Word. As the sun in the heavens is a true 
sun only as it pours forth its radiance, so God is truly God only as he shines 
forth in him who is the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his 
person. The sunlight is derived from the sun, and yet is as old as the sun 
itself ; and the Word is derived from God. yet there never was a time when 
he began to be. In the nature of God from eternity to eternity there is 
outgoing, expression, self -communication. Christ's "goings forth are from 
everlasting." 

So the Spirit, and the work of the Spirit, belong not simply to time but to 
eternity. In the Spirit, we are to conceive of the divine activity and thought 
as returning whence it came, and as completing its movement. Here is a 
ceaseless process of the divine mind ; but there is more than process- 
there is life, fulness of life, the energy of an infinite will, the blessedness of 
absolute and perfect communion. For it is a personal Spirit, just as it is a 
personal Word, of whom we speak. God without distinctions of personality 
would be the living God no longer, he would be a lonely being, dependent 
upon the unsatisfying association of a finite universe, or an unconscious 
being, destitute of mind and heart, and identical with the universe itself. 
If there be one God at all, then that one God must be in some sense three. 
If we give up the Trinity, we must give up all idea of a living Unity. 

And so we reach the proper point of view from which to regard the teach- 
er's relation to the Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit is necessary to 
human salvation, because it is necessary to God himself. All his being is 
grounded in this life-movement of the Spirit, as it is grounded in the life- 
movement of the Son. Let us not make the finite and the infinite change 
places, and fancy God to be less than the things which he has made. The 
mighty tides of life that ebb and flow on the far shores of the universe, only 
shadow forth the unseen and unseeable "cods that go and return within th» 
bosom of God himself. All finite things together are but the "breath of 
his mouth," a drop of dew upon the fringe of his garment, a "whisper of 
him," while the "thunder of his power" is heard and understood by none. 
And all the operations of his grace are only partial manifestations of that 
transcendent movement which goes on forever in God. By working love 



THE TEACHER'S GUIDE AND HELPER. 253 

and holiness in us, and drawing us through Christ and in the Spirit unto the 
Father, he seeks to reproduce in us in our limited measure, the eternal proc- 
ess of the divine mind. There is One toward whom the whole creation 
moves, because it partakes of his internal movement toward himself. The 
Holy Spirit can save men only by drawing them into his own etherial cur- 
rents of affection and will, and thus bearing them on to the meeting-point 
of all his blessed winds, in God. 

If any have been impatient of this peculiar treatment of my theme, as if 
it were too mysterious and lofty, I can only urge them to a close study of 
Scripture, and of their own experience. The teacher who has wearied of 
his own futile efforts, will not think it impractical or valueless to connect 
his labor for the recovery of others to their allegiance to God, with the 
ceaseless divine operation which draws all things, by the celestial gravitation 
of the Holy Spirit, to himself. The Scandinavian mythology tells of a mor- 
tal who attempted to drain a goblet of the gods. The more he drank, the 
more there was to drink. His amazement grew, until he found that the 
goblet was invisibly connected with the sea, and that to empty it, he must 
drink the ocean dry. Surely there can be no comfort or strength so great 
as this, to find that in our labor for the souls of men our work is supervised 
and supplemented, and energized, by One whose resources are vaster than 
the ocean, and whose activity is as all-reaching as the tidal wave that 
sweeps round the world. 

But my second proposition demands attention now, this namely, that the 
teacher is wholly dependent upon the Holy Spirit, because without the 
Spirit's influences, he is utterly powerless to communicate to others the 
truth of God in such a way as to sanctify or save them. For, mark well 
the fact, that the teacher is a real communicator of the truth. Divine effi- 
ciency secures and honors the active exercise of his human powers. The 
Holy Spirit does not supersede or absorb the earthly means. Mind is 
to be reached through mind, and heart through heart, and, in a just sense, 
true teaching by true teachers is the salvation of the world. Now the 
first element of true teaching is a real possession of the truth on the part 
of the teacher himself. And by the truth I do not mean truth of science, 
philosophy or history, but that particular truth with regard to God, man, 
and God's way of saving man, which is made known in Scripture. "The 
truth as it is in Jesus," the truth adapted to man's religious needs, this is 
the special truth of which the teacher needs to become possessor, and which 
is to be the substance of all his teaching. This truth may take as many 
forms as an element in chemistry. It may be crystalized into the Bible 
text ; it may be held in solution in the mind ; or it may float about in the 
shape of airy maxim and unconscious influence. But whatever its form or 
distinctness, some truth with regard to sin and Christ and salvation is the 
agency in connection with which the Holy Spirit works every change, 
whether of conversion or of sanctification. The Holy Spirit makes sensitive 
the heart as the photographer prepares his plate. But unless the object to 
be photographed is set before the camera, and the light from that object is 
poured in upon the plate, no picture results. And so, in conjunction with 
the direct work of the Holy Spirit upon the heart, there must go the pres- 
entation of God's truth in its proper light, if that truth is ever to be im- 
pressed upon the heart and to leave its image there. 






254 THE TEACHER'S GUIDE AND HELPER. 

Let us never forget, moreover, tbat truth with regard to conduct, if it 
Is to have this transforming power, must be incarnated in living persons. 
Abstract precepts do not move us, — they must be translated into life. 
Therefore it is that he who Is the personal Truth came in human form, and 
lived a human life. One look at the suffering love and the atoning purity 
of Christ, can do more to melt and mould the hard and the selfish than all 
the maxims of all the sages. And this same necessity of embodying the 
truth, leads to the appointment of Christian teachers. They are to speak 
the truth, and to lend to it, as they speak, the vividness of present reality. 
They are to exemplify the truth and to show it in its results — clarity of 
thought, purity of emotion, loftiness of aim. If you once think what it is 
to speak to others the truth with regard to Christ, you will see that, without 
the help of the Holy Spirit, it is not within the power of man. To speak 
the truth, one must have the truth and know the truth. No parrot-like 
repetition of the words of Scripture is true teaching. The words of Christ 
— the real substance of what he spoke — were spirit and life. It is the 
ideas behind the words, that are to be communicated. And to get posses- 
sion of these ideas is, to use a German idiom, to think one's self into God's 
thought; it is to press through the veil into the inner sanctuary of divine 
truth ; it is to see for one's self, as Moses saw the Shekinah-glory, and to 
come forth from the holy place, to speak it with burning lips and rejoicing 
heart to others. 

I do not know how any human being can thus get possession of the truth 
he is to give to others, without the help. of the Holy Spirit. I see tlio 
Ethiopian eunuch, on the desert road, wearily and vainly pondering the 
words of the prophet. " Understandest thou what thou readest?" "How 
can I except some one should guide me?" Ah, man needs a guide! The 
eunuch needed the guidance of Philip, — but Philip could never have guided 
the eunuch, unless he himself had had the guidance of the Spirit. Only 
that enabled him to speak as the oracle of God, and to preach Jesus so that 
the Lord High Treasurer of Candace's empire was eager at once to profess 
his faith in the Crucified. 

I see two other New Testament worthies, making their way into the 
temple. At the "Beautiful Gate," there crouches the pitiful shape of a life- 
long cripple. There are few words from the apostles. But with the mention 
of the name of Jesus, that had wrought so many wonders, Peter fastens bis 
eyes steadfastly on the lame man ; he grasps him by the hand to lift him to 
new vigor and freedom ; the very tone of Peter's voice electrifies the suf- 
ferer, as he commands him "in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth," to 
"rise up and walk." The faith of Peter flashes at once into the cripple's 
soul. He leaps to his feet, and praises God. It is a picture of a second 
element of all true teaching, namely, the believing utterance of the truth. 
True teaching is nothing else than a communication of ourselves, an impar- 
tation of our own life to others. Truth is not truth, unless it is enhaloed 
and ensphered in this atmosphere of faith. Teaching is not teaching, unless 
with the intellectual presentation of truth there goes the emotional intensity 
and fervor which indicate profound conviction on the part of the teacher. 
But with this element added, the least fragment of truth has power. The 
single word conv t*n a soul. 



THE TEACHER'S GUIDE AND HELPER. 253 

Do you know any way in which a naturally loveless and apathetic person 
can be filled with enthusiasm in view of truth, so that he utters it with bold- 
ness and irrepressible delight? Contagious zeal — the consuming zeal for 
purity and for right, that like a flame of fire kindles and brightens every- 
thing it touches — have you any recipe for this? The Bible gives us one. 
"Receive ye the Holy Ghost." There are little land-locked ponds, along 
our New England shore, that are shut away from the sea by heavy bars of 
sand. Weeks come and go, and the surface of those ponds is scarcely stirred. 
But on some favored day, a high tide overpasses the bar of sand ; the half- 
stagnant waters are purified ; the land-locked bay is united once more to its 
parent flood, and is stirred to its deepest depths by the pulsations of the 
great, deep sea. So they who in their natural state are sundered from the 
parent-heart of God, are brought by the Holy Spirit into union with him. 
What of themselves they could not feel, they feel now. The Spirit of God 
has communicated to them something of the infinite longing of God's heart, 
and his infinite love for the perishing. They not only pray with unutterable 
sighings for the salvation of men, but when they speak to them of God and 
of his mercy, it is with a confidence and power that none of their adversaries 
are able to gainsay or resist. And all because it is not they that speak, but 
the Holy Spirit. 

True teaching has the truth, and speaks the truth with self-propagating 
faith. But there is yet a third element in it. Besides this real possession 
of the truth, and believing utterance of the truth, there is also a wise adapta- 
tion of the truth to persons and to times. "He that winneth souls is wise." 
The teacher has a work of spiritual surgery to do. He must lay bare the 
sore and ugly spots of character, that he may persuade his patient to undergo 
the divine operation and be healed. He must touch with his scalpel the 
tenderest part — the soul's self-will and pride. Blunt instruments and mis- 
directed treatment will not do. He must not imitate the mistakes of the 
apothecary, and administer a composing draught to the already narcotized 
soul. And on the other hand, "the servant of the Lord must not strive." 
Uuhealthful excitement brings, by necessary law of reaction, a spiritual 
stupor exactly proportional to the waste of nervous power. ' What shall I 
speak?' is a difficult question for the conscientious teacher; 'when shall I 
speak?' is a more difficult question still. "There is a time to speak and 
there is a time to keep silence" — and the suppressed anxiety of a faithful 
friend has often spoken louder than words. To be "instant in season and 
out of season," and yet to be "courteous to all men;" to "redeem the 
time," so that no golden opportunity shall run to waste, and yet to give to 
each, not another's, but his own "portion, in due season," this, in matters 
of the soul, requires a spiritual discernment that is foreign to mere human 
nature. 

But the labyrinth has a clue, the moment the teacher regards himself as 
a servant of the Spirit. He speaks now "as the Spirit gives him utterance." 
He is practically, as well as theoretically, guided into the truth. He is 
enabled to interpret God's providences, so that they disclose to him his 
duty. And that, in no mystical way of new revelation apart from Scripture, 
but in the rational and Biblical way of quickening his intellectual powers, 
so that he exercises a common sense that is sanctified, and a judgment free 






256 THE TEACHER'S GUIDE AND HELPER. 

from selflsh bias. Have you noticed the steady and quiet strength of the 
man who trusts the Spirit's word: "I will instruct thee and teach thee in 
the way that thou shalt go; I will guide thee with mine eye?" The Scrip- 
tures contrast the full tide of rational and satisfied life which fills the breast 
of the Christian, with the wild excitements and insatiable cravings of him 
whose dependence is upon physical stimulants. "Be not drunk with wine, 
wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit." No, the atmosphere of the 
Spirit is not one of nitrous oxide, — it is the pure, cool air of the mountain- 
tops of truth, and the more one breathes it, the more he recognizes it as a 
"spirit of power and of love and of sound mind." A wisdom that is not of 
this world, becomes his. The Holy Spirit makes him not only a ready but 
a trained and skilled assistant, in the work of bringing others to Christ. 

Persons who are not naturally attractive have in these ways been made 
centres of saving influence. The bent piece of soft iron has no natural power 
to draw other iron to itself, — but attach it to the battery, and it becomes a 
magnet, that draws to itself everything within its range. Sunder its con- 
nection with the copper and the zinc, and all power is gone, but thus con- 
nected, it is its very nature to attract. So let God's Holy Spirit take 
possession of the teacher and he becomes a magnet, to draw those whom he • 
instructs to God. Virtue goes forth from him. He becomes a living force 
for good. Borne himself upon the mighty current that sweeps toward the 
centre and source of all things, he finds that he is not left to go alone. 
Others are won who commit their barks to this same current, and so to ac- 
company or follow him. Even though he may see no outward sign of the 
movement in himself, or of the power that he has on others, still he may be 
sure that the Holy Spirit uses him. You remember those Arctic explorers, 
who day after day with infinite toil and pain, made their way northward, as 
they thought, only to find at the week's end that their instruments indicated 
a progress of many miles in the opposite direction. They thought them- 
selves going away from home and friends, but they found themselves nearer 
to them at the end than when they began. At last they solved the problem. 
They were not on solid ground at all, but rather upon an ice-floe of vast 
extent, and this whole mass, apparently solid as the granite hills, was mov- 
ing towards the tropics every day upon the bosom of an ocean-current so 
broad and deep and still as to give no sign whatever of its power. So the 
teacher may seem to himself to be getting further and further away from 
the things he loves and the persons for whom he labors. But in spite of all 
appearances, God is furthering his work by invisible but tremendous opera- 
tions of his providence and grace. He supplements our efforts, and guides 
them to ends which his wisdom, and not our skill, has set. Consciously or 
unconsciously, we are borne onward to the accomplishment of the plans and 
to the glory of the name of him, "of whom, and through whom, and to 
whom are all things." 

Thus I have spoken of our need of the Spirit as grounded, first, in the 
methods and nature of God, and secondly, in the ignorance and powerless- 
ness of man. Or to put it in plainer words, we need the Holy Spirit, first, 
because without him we can receive nothing from God. We need the Holy 
Spirit, secondly, because without him we can communicate nothing to men. 
And I have shown you that this last is certain, because only the Holy Spirit 



THE TEACHER'S GUIDE AND HELPER. 257 

can make us real possessors of the truth, believing advocates of the truth, 
and wise adapters of the truths to the wants of those we teach. But the 
Holy Spirit can make us able teachers. And the gift or cue Holy Spirit is 
within our reach. The power to bestow the Holy Spirit, and to make men 
teachers of his word, was part of the Savior's recompense for his sufferings. 
He could not give the Spirit, until he was glorified. But now, he sits at the 
right hand of power, for the express purpose of pouring into us, through 
the Spirit, the inexhaustible fulness of his divine life. I honor Christ my 
Lord, not when I hold back, from a sense of my unworthiness, and refuse 
to believe that so great a gift can be for me; I honor him only when I take 
the gift, in the same spirit in which it is offered, and use it gratefully in the 
service of him who gave it. 

The decision whether I will have this Holy Spirit, this present Christ, this 
fulness of power and blessing, rests in a true sense with me. Unless I will 
to have it, it will never be mine. I must put iu the link of connection 
between my soul and God's efficiency, by the exercise of faith There is a 
great reservoir of sweet and limpid water up among the hills, all gathered 
there by the art of man, for the supply of the thirsty town. Conduits are 
built, and pipes are laid; my own house is provided with basin and faucet; 
but still the water does not run, and I am dry. What is lacking? Nothing 
but the touch of my baud,- — yet without that, I may go thirsty all the day. 
My friends, Christ is a reservoir in which all the resources of the Godhead 
are gathered up, and gathered up for the use of each of us. The Holy 
Spirit is the conduit through which Christ's fulness comes to us. And yet 
we shall never be practical possessors of his power, until by a personal act 
of surrender and of faith, we set the stream to running. Set it running, 
and let it never stop! Drinking it, you shall never thirst, and it shall be in 
you a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life. 

There is only one thing more. Let this water bless others, as well as 
yourself. Our Lord did not forget this, when he gave his promise. "In 
that last, that great day of the feast," when he "stood and cried, saying: If 
any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink," he added these words: 
"He that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his heart" — 
stirred as it is with new-discovered truth and purified by nobler affections — 
"shall flow rivers of living water. . But this spake he of the Spirit, which 
they which believe on him should receive." He only is a true servant of 
Christ, who receives in order to give. He shall receive abundantly, only in 
order that he may give abundantly. The spring that has gladdened his own 
heart shall gladden others. Widening and deepening as they flow, the 
waters from it, like those of Ezekiel's vision, shall carry life and verdure 
with them, until somewhere in the future, near or far, the ultimate result 
shall be the recovery of all the moral wastes that have been caused by sin, 
and the recreation of the earth in the beauty of our God. 

On Easter morning at Jerusalem, the people gather together in the Church 
of the Holy Sepulchre, long before the dawn, all carrying torches not yet 
lighted. The Archbishop enters the tomb in which tradition relates that 
the body of Christ was laid, and brings out from it a lighted torch, which 
he pretends to have been kindled there by supernatural power. One by 
one the people light their torches from its blaze, and others are lit from 
17 



258 THE TEACHER'S GUIDE AND HELPER. 

these, until the darkness of the great church is chased away by the flooding 
radiance of many thousand lamps. The people carry the sacred fire to their 
homes, lighting still other torches as they go, until every Christian house in 
the great city is illuminated. So Christian influence widens and spreads. 
The fountain of its light and power is in the presence of the Lord — not in 
the sepulchre where his body lay, but in the secret place where the risen 
and glorified Redeemer meets with his chosen ones, and communicates to 
them his own life-giving Spirit. But he who has his own soul kindled there, 
gives light to those he meets, and is not impoverished but enriched by giv- 
ing. Oh you, to whom is given the work of teaching others in the truth of 
God, regard the dignity of your vocation and fulfill it well ! Recognize the 
Holy Spirit as the only source of power, and the Holy Spirit will prosper 
your labors ! As you have the promise of the Father, put that promise to 
the test, and receive the Holy Ghost ! So, enlightened and quickened by 
God himself, you shall be "servants of the Spirit," and successful partici- 
pants in his great work — that work of which nature and history are but the 
preparation and arena — the work of bringing back a revolted humanity to 
its lost estate of holiness and of communion with Godl 



XXII. 

councils of ordination : their powers and 
duties; 



In an age like the present, when laxity in doctrine abounds, and when 
men are not unfrequently led by unworthy motives to desire the pastoral 
office, it concerns the purity and even the existence of our churches to sur- 
round with all proper safeguards the entrance to the ministry. Such safe- 
guards may in part be found in Ordaining Councils, provided that those 
who compose these bodies have proper understanding of their position and 
responsibilities. It is the object of this paper to present a just view of the 
powers and duties of such Councils, and to indicate the method of proced- 
ure best adapted to secure the ends for which they are called. 

When we speak of the powers of Councils, we do not mean to intimate 
that these Councils are self-constituted, or that they have original authority. 
The Council, on the contrary, is called into existence only by the local 
church, can determine only such questions as that church may submit for 
its consideration, and has power to advise the church what its action should 
be, but no power to compel the acceptance of this advice. The so-called 
Council of Jerusalem certainly gives us New Testament example for one 
church's seeking advice from other churches, in difficult junctures, but 
there was, as we may suppose, an element of inspiration in that decree of 
"the apostles and elders with the whole church," which cannot be claimed 
for the conclusions of subsequent Councils. While Scripture favors that 
interdependence of local churches which results from acknowledging the in- 
dwelling of the Holy Spirit in others as well as in ourselves, and the due 
value of the public opinion of the churches as an indication of the mind of 
the Spirit, it still in the last resort throws each church upon its own re- 
sponsibility of ascertaining doctrine and duty by individual interpretation of 
the divine providence and word. Interdependence, in short, is but the 
qualification of a fundamental and inalienable independence. On earth 
there is no higher authority than that of the local church. No other church, 
and no union of churches, whether directly or through its representatives, 
has any rightful jurisdiction over the single local body which Christ has 
brought into immediate subjection to himself as Lawgiver and King. 

Yet all the more has the Council, when rightly called and constituted, the 
power of moral Influence. Its decision is an index to truth, which only the 
gravest reasons will justify the church in ignoring or refusing to follow. If 
there is a moral obligation to seek its advice, there is also, in all ordinary 
cases, a moral obligation resting upon the church to take its advice, when 



Printed in the Examiner, January 2 and January 9, 1879. 
259 



260 COUNCILS OF ORDINATION: 

this advice is given. So much, at least, is assumed when matters of import- 
ance are committed to the decision of a Council, with no provision for a 
subsequent meeting of the church to review the Council's action. In such 
case the church virtually constitutes the Council its representative, in effect 
deputes the Council to act in its place, tacitly accepts the decision of the 
Council as its own. The fact that the church has always the right, for just 
cause, of going behind the decision of the Council, and of determining 
whether it will ratify or reject that decision, shows conclusively that the 
church has parted with no particle of its original independence or authority. 
Yet though the Council is simply a counsellor — an organ and helper of the 
church — the neglect of its advice may involve such ecclesiastical or moral 
wrong as to justify the churches represented in it, as well as other churches, 
in withdrawing from the church that called it their denominational or Chris- 
tian fellowship. 

It is but an application of these general principles to a particular case, 
when we say that it is the church which ordains, and that in ordination the 
Council is only the adviser and assistant of the church. In ordination, as 
in deposition from the ministry, the church may, in extreme cases, proceed 
without a Council or in spite of the decision of a Council ; the effect, how- 
ever, being that such ordinance or deposition on the part of the single 
church has no ecclesiastical validity outside of its own body, and that the 
church may be even disfellowshiped by neighboring churches where there 
is manifest violation of New Testament principles in its procedure. 

Ordination is an ecclesiastical act so important in itself, and so serious in 
influence upon other churches as well as upon the church that ordains, that 
the counsel of others may well be deemed obligatory before the act is con- 
summated. In the case of deacons, who sustain official relations only to the 
church that constitutes them, ordination requires no consultation with other 
churches. Licensure, which points only to a temporary or experimental 
service, may properly be left to the wisdom of the individual church. But 
the setting apart of a preacher of the gospel to a permanent work of minis- 
tration in the churches involves so grave responsibilities and demands such 
practised judgment, that the ordaining church should never fail, where this 
is possible, to add to its own the wisdom and experience of other churches 
of the same faith and order. 

The Council is called, therefore, not to confer upon the candidate, by 
superior authority, some special grace without which he could not be denom- 
inated a true minister of Christ, but to assist the church in two respects : 
first, in determining whether the candidate has been called and qualified by 
God's providence and Spirit; and secondly, in granting to him express 
authorization to exercise his gifts as pastor or teacher, within certain definite 
local boundaries of the church or the denomination. The prior call to be 
pastor may be said, in the case of a man yet unordained, to be given condi- 
tionally, and in anticipation of a ratification of its action by the subsequent 
judgment of the Council. In a well-instructed church, the calling of a Coun- 
cil is a regular method of appeal from the church unadvised to the church 
advised by its brethren, and the vote of the Council approving the candi- 
date is only the essential completing of an ordination of which the vote of 
the church calling the candidate to the pastorate was the preliminary stage. 



THEIR TOWERS AND DUTIES. 201 

It has been proposed of late that the Council of Ordination shall consist 
only of ministers who have been themselves ordained. The proposition 
seems to us to contradict not only our denominational usage and principles, 
but the plain tenor of Scripture teaching. That Timothy is enjoined to 
commit the things which he has learned to faithful men who shall be able 
to teach others also, by no means defines the method in which he shall fulfill 
the commission. The analogy of the choice of Matthias, and of the election 
of deacons, would indicate that Timothy obeyed the precept by setting apart 
those who had been previously chosen by the suffrages of the whole body 
of each church respectively. All this was done by the churches under the 
advice of one endowed with special divine gifts, and clothed with unique 
and exceptional authority. But who shall be the advisers of our later 
churches in this solemn matter of ordination? This must be determined, 
not from the example of Timothy, for none have succeeded to his precise 
place and work, but from the general tenor of apostolic teaching with regard 
to the duties and responsibilities of all members of the church of Christ. 

Careful examination will show that there was laid, not solely upon the 
presbytery or ministry, but upon the whole body of believers, the responsi- 
bility of maintaining pure doctrine and practice, of preserving and guard- 
ing the ordinances, of electing their own officers and delegates, and of exer- 
cising discipline. It is not merely the apostles and elders, but the whole 
church of Jerusalem, that passed upon the matters submitted to them at the 
Council, and others than ministers appear to have been delegates. The 
Scripture intimates that its own simplicity and sufficiency were designed 
for the very purpose of inducing individual interpretation of its contents, so 
that each Christian might judge of the correctness with which it was 
preached. How, then, can it be maintained that, in deciding upon the doc- 
trinal qualifications of a candidate for the ministry, the laity are to have no 
voice? In many an age of church history, as to-day in the Free Church of 
Scotland, the Scriptural conservatism of the laity has been the most potent 
influence in preventing the general adoption of lax and erroneous views, to 
which the ministry have been inclined. Moreover the Council of Ordination 
is to pass, not only upon matters of doctrine, but upon matters of Christian 
experience, and of these the unordained church member is often a more 
sagacious judge than his pastor. As we see no Scriptural warrant for the 
exclusion of lay delegates from Ordaining Councils, but rather abundant 
evidence to show its inconsistency with the fundamental principles of a true 
church polity, so we reject the proposed innovation as having in it the 
beginnings of a hierarchy. To make the ministry a close corporation is to 
recognize the principle of apostolic succession, to deny the validity of all 
our past ordinations, and to sell to an ecclesiastical caste the liberties of the 
church of God. 

The very first of the duties devolving upon the member of a Council of 
Ordination would seem to be the cherishing of a high sense of the dignity 
and solemnity of his office, and the determination to discharge his functions 
with independence and judicial fairness as in the sight of God. He has 
been called to be an adviser of the church of Christ in a matter affecting its 
very life. He is appointed as representative of another church, because in 
that other church the Spirit of God is believed to dwell. His business is to 



262 COUNCILS OF ORDINATION: 

judge of the work of that same Spirit in the heart and mind of one who 
claims to have been chosen by God to be his ambassador, and he is to reach 
his decision by comparing the utterances and the manner of the claimant 
with God's revealed will. Surely no more lofty or serious task was ever set 
for man to do. Frivolity, party-spirit, favoritism, personal pique or resent- 
ment, over-anxiety to please — in short, the whole brood of worldly impulses 
and motives — what place or right have they at an occasion so pregnant with 
blessing or disaster to the cause of our Lord ! 

But it is not enough to have the right spirit. It is a duty to provide 
against the wrong, and by all needful precautions ensure the issuance of a 
true intent in wise action. The Council does not come together to ratify 
the immutable decrees of the local church, but rather to give to the body 
that called it a sound and candid judgment upon the facts presented before 
it. The Council should therefore be so numerous and so impartially consti- 
tuted that no danger remains of its being over-awed or unduly influenced 
by the hopes or feelings of the community or of the church. It is obliga- 
tory upon those who call the Council to furnish, in the letter-missive, a list 
of the churches invited, that the churches summoned may see for themselves 
that the Council is to be neither so insignificant in numbers as to make pos- 
sible only a show of deliberation, nor so packed as to make possible only a 
predetermined verdict. Neither the ministerial nor the lay element should 
be relatively so numerous as to make it possible for one to override the 
other, and for this reason each church might well be invited to send only a 
single lay delegate with its pastor — an arrangement all the more valuable 
if the limitation of the number of delegates from each church should compel 
the invitation of a wider circle of churches. The church calling the Council 
should of course be represented by its delegates, but the number of these 
delegates should not be so great as to give undue weight, in the general dis- 
cussion and decision, to the church's previously formed opinions. Neither 
the church nor the Council should permit a prejudgment of the case by the 
previous announcement of an ordination-service. The ordination-service 
should never be held or expected upon the same day with the examination 
of the candidate, for in every case of difficulty such an arrangement unduly 
curtails the Council's time for deliberation, and brings a pressure to bear 
from without, which involves danger of a sudden and a wrong decision. 
Moreover, while the examination of the candidate as well as his own state- 
ments of faith and experience should be in presence of the whole church, 
both for the sake of furnishing him the best introduction to their respect 
and Christian sympathies, and for the sake of furnishing the Council the 
fullest opportunity of estimating his ability to sustain examination, the 
Council should always conduct its subsequent deliberations in private session, 
and that this private session may be held, either the congregation should 
be dismissed or a withdrawing-room should be made ready for the Council. 

The suggestions already made are embodied in the following blank form 
of a Letter-missive, in which it will be observed that the correct view of the 
church as the ordaining body is expressed in the resolve to ordain in case 
the counselling brethren approve the candidate after examination. All 
question with regard to the necessity of a special vote of the church ratify- 
ing the decision of the Council is in this manner obviated. 



TITEIR rOWERS AND DUTIES. 253 



The Baptist church of to the Baptist church of : 

Dear Brethren : By vote of this church you are requested to send your 
pastor and one delegate to meet with us in accordance with the following 
resolutions passed by us on the , 191—: 

Wiikreas, brother , a member of this church, has offered himself to 

the work of the gospel ministry, and has been chosen by us as our pastor, 
therefore, 

Iicsi'lr, il t That such neighboring churches in fellowship with us as shall be 
herein designated be requested to send their pastor and one delegate each, to 

meet and counsel with this church at — o'clock — M., on , 191-, and 

if. after examination by the Council, he be approved, that brother be on 

the next day set apart formally, by public service, to the gospel ministry. 

i;> solved, That the Council, if they approve the ordination, be requested to 
appoint two of their number to act with brother in arranging the ordi- 
nation services. 

Resolved, That printed letters of invitation embodying these resolutions, 
and signed by the clerk of this church, be sent to the following churches. 
- , , , , , and that these churches be requested to fur- 
nish to their delegates an officially signed certificate of their appointment, to 
be presented at the organization of the Council. 

Resolved, That Rev. and brethren be also invited by the clerk 

of the church to be present as members of the Council. 

Resolved, That Rev. , , and , be appointed as our dele- 
gates, to represent this church in the deliberations of the Council, and that 

brother be requested to present the candidate to the Council, with an 

expression of the high respect and warm attachment with which we have 
welcomed him and his labors among us. 

In behalf of the church, 

, 191-. , Clerk. 

A just conclusion of the labors of the Council may be either facilitated or 
hindered by the forms observed in its conduct. Although, in this, individ- 
ual freedom and local usage must have their influence, yet there are advan- 
tages in uniformity of action, and it is with a view to promote this uniform- 
ity that we here suggest certain rules which already, in some portions of 
the country, have been found practicable and serviceable. Our present 
methods are too often loose and inefficient. Not unfrequently a moderator 
is chosen, before it can be told that there exists a Council to be moderated. 
Persons are counted as members of the Council, upon their mere oral dec- 
laration that a certain church has appointed them its delegates. Members 
of the Council are so scattered in the general audience that, in voting, they 
are indistinguishable from those who are not members. Candidates have 
been admitted to examination without presenting documentary evidence of 
membership in the ordaining church, or in any other properly constituted 
church. Severe scrutiny fails to be given to imperfect or unsatisfactory 
statements of the candidate, because of an undue anxiety to spare him what 
might be a salutary mortification. Good brethren refrain from opposing 
manfully the acceptance of an unsound or incompetent person, because of 
over-desire to gratify the church. These are ways in which the real purpose 
of Council may be either endangered or altogether frustrated. There is 
a call for moral courage in standing squarely against either hasty or unwar- 



264 COUNCILS OF ORDINATION: 

ranted action. Where differences from the faith on the part of candi- 
date are not vital, it may be duty for a member of the Council to fall in with 
the general decision of his brethren. There are more serious cases, where 
dissent should manifest itself in protest and withdrawal. 

As a safeguard against the irregularities already mentioned, as well as 
against other and more serious evils that might follow iu their train, the fol- 
lowing would seem to be a useful and proper order of procedure : 

1. Reading by the clerk of the chiirch, of the letter-missive, followed by a 
call, in their order, upou each church and individual invited, to present re- 
sponses and names in writing — each delegate, as he presents his credentials, 
taking his seat in a portion of the house reserved for the Council. 

2. Announcement by the clerk of the church, that a Council has convened, 
and call for the nomination of a moderator — the motion to be put by the 
clerk — after which the moderator takes the chair. 

3. Organization completed by election of a clerk of the Council, the offer- 
ing of prayer, and the invitation of visiting brethren to sit with the Coun- 
cil but not to vote. 

4. Reading on behalf of the church, by its clerk, of the records of the church 
concerning the call extended to the candidate and his acceptance, together with 
documentary evidence of his licensure, of his present church membership, and 
of his standing in other respects, if coming from another denomination. 

5. Vote, by the Council, that the proceedings of the church and the stand- 
ing of the candidate warrant an examination of his claim to ordination. 

6. Introduction of the candidate to the Council by some representative of 
the church, with an expression of the church's feeliug respecting him and 
his labors. 

7. Vote to hear his Christian experience. Narration on the part of the 
candidate, followed by questions as to any features of it still needing eluci- 
dation. 

8. Vote to hear the candidate's reasons for believing himself called to the 
ministry. Narration and questions. 

9. Vote to hear the candidate's views of Christian doctrine. Narration 
and questions. 

10. Vote to conclude the public examination and to withdraw for private 
session. 

11. In private session, after prayer, the Council determines by three sepa- 
rate votes, in order to secure separate consideration of each question, wheth- 
er it is satisfied with the candidate's Christian experience, call to the minis- 
try, and views of Christian doctrine. 

12. Vote that the candidate be hereby set apart to the Gospel ministry, and 
that a public service be held, expressive of this fact; that for this purpose 
a committee of two be appointed, to act with the candidate in arranging 
such service of ordination, and to report before adjournment. 

13. Reading of minutes by clerk of Council, and correction of them, to. 
prepare for presentation at the ordination service and for preservation in 
the archives of the church. 

14. Vote to give the candidate a certificate of ordination, signed by the 
moderator and clerk of the Council, and t© publish an account of the pro- 
ceedings in the journals of the denomination. 

15. Adjourn to meet at the service of ordination. 

It has been seen that ordination is essentially a setting apart, first, by 



THEIR POWERS AND DUTIES. 2G5 

vote of the church, and secondly, by vote of the advisory Council. These 
two votes express both a recognition of gifts conferred by God, and an 
authorization to exercise those gifts within the bounds of the Church and 
the denomination. These two votes are parts of one whole. They show 
the candidate to be the choice of the church and of the Council — or, which 
is the same thing, of the church by itself and of the church advised by its 
brethren. Examination is a prerequisite to the decision of the Council, 
because if the candidate is to be recognized as a minister by other churches, 
lie must give them proof of his fitness, and that all the more, if he come 
from a denomination whose doctrine and practice differ from our own. This 
netting apart by the church, with the advice and assistance of the Council, 
is ;ill that is necessarily implied in the New Testament words which are 
translated "ordain," and such ordination by simple vote of church and 
Council could not be counted invalid. 

But it would be irregular. New Testament precedent, which is the com- 
mon law of the church, has, in the general judgment of our churches, made 
certain accompaniments of ordination not only appropriate but obligatory. 
A formal publication of the decree of the Council, by laying on of hands in 
connection with solemn prayer, is the last of the duties devolving upon this 
advisory body which serves as the organ and assistant of the church. This 
public service is not the essence of ordination, nor does it convey any new 
powers, much less any divine grace. Although, in the case of Timothy, 
there appears to have been a special divine gift bestowed in connection with 
the laying on of hands, the communication of miraculous or spiritual gifts 
was not the result of this imposition of hands, nor was it the object for 
which hands were imposed in his ordination ; for hands were imposed, as 
in the cases of the deacons and of Paul and Barnabas, where no record exists 
of the bestowment, through that act, of any spiritual or miraculous gifts at 
all. The imposition of hands is the symbolic and public side of ordination, 
just as baptism is the symbolic and public side of regeneration. As the 
essential thing in salvation is the new birth of the Spirit, yet the entrance 
of the whole man into the outward as well as inward kingdom of God is not 
complete until this being born of the Spirit is formally and publicly expressed 
and symbolized by being born of water also, — so the essential thing in ordi- 
nation is the recognition and authorization by vote of church and Council, 
yet the duty of the Council is not fulfilled until it has symbolically and out- 
wardly proclaimed this recognition and authorization by laying on of hands 
and prayer. 

Thus the laying on of hands is appointed to be the regular accompani- 
ment of ordination, as baptism is appointed to be the regular accompaniment 
of regeneration, while yet the laying on of hands is no more the substance of 
ordination than baptism is the substance of regeneration. The imposition 
of hands is the natural symbol of the communication, not of grace, but of 
authority. If this distinction be only well observed, we conceive that all 
objection to the retention of the symbol must disappear. The laying on of 
hands does not make Spurgeon a minister of the gospel, any more than 
coronation makes Victoria a Queen. What it does signify and publish is 
formal recognition and authorization, and in this light the continued insist- 
ence upon the holding of a public service, of which the central feature shall 



2G6 COUNCILS OF ORDINATION: 

be prayer and the laying on of hands, may well be regarded as the bonndcn 
duty of every Council of ordination which, by vote, sets apart a candidate 
to the ministry. 

If recognition and authorization be the essential things in ordination, 
decreed by vote and symbolized by public service, then important light is 
thrown upon the question whether ministers coming to us from other bodies 
of Christians should be ordained. The proper inquiries would seem to bt 
these: Have they ever been recognized by the representatives of rightly 
constituted churches, after examination, as doctrinally and practically quali- 
fied for the ministry? Have they ever been authorized, by the vote of such 
a Council, to exercise their gifts within the bounds of our denomination? 
If not, it would seem that they still need ordination. Surely they are not 
now authorized to do what they have never agreed to do, — namely, minister 
to Baptist churches. The view that we should accept as valid some previous 
ordination in another denomination proceeds evidently upon the falst 
assumption that action of every ecclesiastical body is valid, not only for 
churches of its own faith and order, but for all churches of every name. 
And no line can be drawn the moment we pass our own bounds, — Roman 
Catholic ordination must be valid as well as Presbyterian. Nor does our 
logic class us with Separatists or extreme Independents. In so far as ordi- 
nation is an act performed by the local church, with the advice and assist- 
ance of other rightly constituted churches, we regard it as giving formal 
permission to exercise gifts and administer ordinances within the bounds of 
such churches. Ordination is not, therefore, to be repeated upon the trans- 
fer of the minister's pastoral relation from one such church to another. In 
every case, however, where a minister from a body of Christians not Scrip- 
turally constituted assumes the pastoral relation in a rightly organized 
church, there is peculiar propriety in that act of recognition and authoriza- 
tion which is the essence of ordination. And if it be proper that he be 
examined and his claims passed upon by vote of Council, it is equally prop- 
er that he submit to that formal service of laying on of hands and prayer, 
by which the previous action of the church and Council is simply published 
and symbolized. We are now ready to state in full that a regular ordina- 
tion, conducted upon Scriptural principles, and therefore valid among all 
churches of our faith and order, involves three things : first, the call of a 
church to the candidate to become its pastor; secondly, the vote of a Coun- 
cil to recognize and authorize the candidate to exercise his gifts in the 
churches as a minister of Christ ; and thirdly, a public service in which, by 
prayer and imposition of hands, this authority is formally and symbolically 
conferred. Of these three, the two former are the essentials, the last the 
regular and appropriate accompaniment. It is to be regretted that the word 
ordination, which in the* New Testament covers the whole process of setting 
apart in all its three stages, should so frequently, even among us, be inter- 
preted as referring only to the last. Thus the Council's final and most 
important vote is often a vote to "proceed to ordination." This intimates 
that the public service is the essence of ordination. The vote, as we have 
already intimated, should rather be a vote "that the candidate be hereby 
set apart to the gospel ministry, and that a formal and public service be held 
expressive of this fact." We have derived our denominational principles 



THEIR POWERS AND DUTIES. 2G7 

from thf New Testament* but Hie language in which we too commonly 
express these principles comes (o us from the usage of denominations which 
deny them. It will be well for us to conform our terminology to our faith, 
lost our faith be gradually bout into conformity with our terminology. 

The true idea of the public service, as simply expressing and formally 
completing the ordination, will determine to a considerable extent the order 
and relation of parts in the service. It is evident that the central features 
should be the prayer of ordination and the imposition of hands. This 
prayer, instead of being substantially anticipated in the opening invocation, 
should be reserved to a single brother in the ministry; and others of the 
older ministers, as a true presbytery, should, in connection with the prayer, 
if not during its utterance, lay their hands upon the head of the candidate. 
The prayer should recognize in the decision of the Council the new evidence 
that the church has been guided by God in its choice, and should invoke 
upon the candidate, as he is formally set apart to the sacred office, the 
blessing of God that is needed to render his work successful. These being 
the chief portions of the service, all the other parts should be arranged with 
reference to them. The sermon, if one be preached, should be a general 
presentation of the gospel which the candidate is to proclaim, preparing the 
way for the solemnity of the ordaining prayer, but not anticipating or super- 
seding the words of admonition to candidate and church which are to follow 
it. Before these charges and after the ordaining prayer the brother, now 
already ordained in the fullest sense, may well be welcomed to the fellow- 
ship of the Christian ministry, with the presentation of the right hand and 
a few well-chosen words of Christian congratulation. That these many serv- 
ices may be impressive, it is important that each should be not only appro- 
priate but brief, and with this view the musical portion of the services should 
be confined within narrow limits, and the utmost punctuality secured in the 
assembling of the audience and the beginning of the exercises. The prac- 
tical and executive ability of the candidate may find good field for its first 
exercise, in preparing his church for this service of ordination. "Well 
arranged and carried out, no service of all his after-ministry can be of 
greater value either to himself or to the people of whom he is the pastor. 

The following scheme is presented as indicating an appropriate order of 
exercises, as well as the relative amount of time which may be granted to 
each participant in a service whose total length shall be two hours : 

1. Voluntary — five minutes. 2. Anthem — five. 3. Reading minutes of 
the Council, by the clerk of the Council — ten. 4. Prayer of Invocation — • 
five. 5. Reading of Scripture — five. 6. Sermon — twenty-five. 7. Prayer of 
Ordination, with laying on of hands — fifteen. 8. Hymn — ten. 9. Right 
hand of fellowship — five. 10. Charge to the candidate — fifteen. 11. Charge 
to the church — fifteen. 12. Doxology — five. 13. Benediction by the newly 
ordained pastor. 

It has been intimated that deacons as well as pastors should be ordaiued. 
Although in this case, for the reason already given, the church may proceed 
without the advice of a Council, yet it would seem quite as clear that New 
Testament precedent requires the ordination of deacons to be accompanied 
with prayer and the laying on of hands, as that pastors should be thus 



2C8 COUNCILS OF ORDINATION. 

inducted into office. But is ordination confined to pastors and deacons? 
Analogy would teach that all whose permanent vocation in life is to be that 
of expounding the word of God should come under the same law, and 
should be set apart, in like manner, to this sacred work. This is especially 
important in the case of those who are to teach the teachers, as in our Theo- 
logical Seminaries. Theirs is a grave responsibility; it should be intrusted 
only to those who, after careful examination, approve themselves as sound 
in doctrine and Christian in spirit. Every such teacher is to be regarded as 
a minister of Christ assigned to special service by the church to which he 
belongs ; he should therefore be ordained with the advice of a Council, not 
to be pastor, but to be teacher, — ordained not by the Theological Seminary, 
which has no such powers committed to it, but by the local church with 
which he is connected. In like manner, missionaries to new regions abroad 
should be accounted ministers of the churches to which they belong, 
assigned to service in foreign lands ; they should therefore be ordained by 
these churches. Philip, baptizing the eunuch, is to be regarded as an 
organ of the church of Jerusalem. Both home missionaries and foreign 
missionaries are the true New Testament evangelists ; and both, as organs 
of the home churches to which they belong, are not under obligation to 
take letters of dismission to the churches they gather. Their ordinations, 
like all other ordinations, should be regarded as having no continuous 
validity after the facts upon which they were based have ceased to exist. 
Retirement from the office of public religious teacher should work a forfeit- 
ure of the official character. The authorization granted by the Council was 
based upon a previous recognition of a divine call. When, by reason of 
permanent withdrawal from the ministry and devotion to wholly secular 
occupations, there remains no longer any divine call to be recognized, all 
authority and standing as a Christian minister should cease also. 

There are many curious and interesting questions suggested by this dis- 
cussion, upon which we have not touched, and upon which no general agree- 
ment has yet been reached among us. We are convinced, however, that the 
principles which have been laid down afford the true basis for the solution 
of these questions, and that the correctness of the principles themselves may 
be either proved by positive Scripture statements or justly deduced there- 
from. We have attempted to point out certain practical methods of carry- 
ing out these principles, and of guarding them from misapprehension and 
neglect. A thorough exhibition of them as centering in the direct subjec- 
tion of each church, as of each soul, to Christ the Lord, and an application 
of them to all the practical exigencies of our church and denominational 
life, is yet a work of the future. 



XXIII. 

THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY ON YOUNG 

MEN IN COURSES OF PREPARATORY STUDY.* 



Just a hundred years ago this very morning, behind some half-finished 
earth-works and a rail fence filled in with new-mown hay, about a thousand 
undisciplined militiamen undertook to defend Breed's Hill, near Boston, 
from the attack of two thousand British regulars. It was a hotter day than 
this has been, and the redcoats, heavily laden with rations for themselves 
and ball-cartridges for the Yankees, moved slowly up toward the fortifica- 
tions which these latter had been throwing up during the night. Putnam 
and Prescott went about among our men, saying: "Aim low; wait till you 
can see the whites of their eyes!" That waiting was a test of courage, — 
it is not easy to wait with a mighty column of troops moving upon you. 
But the raw recruits did wait till the British were only ten rods away, and 
then, taking sure and deadly aim, they fired. With that fire, scores of the 
advancing soldiers fell ; the survivors faltered and began retreat. Their 
officers drove them back, and even pricked them with their swords to pre- 
vent their running away ; reinforcing columns advanced ; a second charge 
was made, but as before, half of the attacking force fell before the withering 
fire. If the Americans had only been provided with powder, they might 
have won the day, — but one round more exhausted their ammunition, and 
at the third general advance of the British, our men were obliged to retire. 
The battle commonly called Bunker Hill had been fought, and the inspira- 
tion and the lessons of it had become matters of history. Lost though it 
was, it was as good as a battle gained. It convinced our countrymen that 
war was upon them, and that they must fight it through. It nerved America 
for the long and bitter conflict that followed, by proving that British regu- 
lars were no more than a match for American volunteers. It furnished the 
type and seed of many after battles and of that final victory, which was 
gained by patience and fortitude and trust In God and the shedding of 
patriotic blood. 

Here in these pleasant seats of learning and of religion, and at this quiet 
hour, there are no counter-signs and sentries and roll-calls after battlg. and 
groans of wounded men, such as were there at Bunker Hill on the evening 
of that 17th of June, a hundred years ago. But I cannot repress the feeling 
that we are deciding the future,, and planting the seeds of greatness or of 
shame, as really as they did then. A few men like Warren, who were will- 
ing to give their lives for their country, determined that day their country's 



* An address written for the Anniversary of Peddie Institute, Hightstown, 
N. J., June 17, 1875. 

269 



270 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 

position among the nations of the earth. And so you, in these preparatory 
schools, and in these societies that represent and adorn them, stand at the 
fountain head of coming history. What you are and what you do and what 
you resolve here, will make its mark not only upon your own lives but upon 
the character and fate of this and of other generations. We cannot estimate 
too highly the importance of this early work and of the decisions which are 
now made. Our philosophers and educators are coming to see that the 
elementary drill determines the future of the student and of the man. Let 
the primary instruction be absolutely thorough, and subsequent advancement 
will be natural and rapid. Let the boy begin his Latin with a listless and 
indolent and superficial spirit, and all after opportunities will serve him in 
vain. And so with regard to early impulses and aspirations. The first 
notions with regard to one's calling in life, and to the honorableness and 
advantage of the several pursuits in which men's hands and hearts un- 
engaged, have much to do with the forming of the young man's character 
and the determining of his after failure or success. And this thought leads 
me to the subject of my address this evening. I wish to speak to you with 
regard to one of these pursuits in life, which is seldom formally commended 
to young men, but in which we all ought to be deeply interested. Standing, 
as I do, in a place where proper thoughts of it are so much to be desired, 
both for the sake of those who are planning their life-work, as well as for 
the sake of the church and the world, I feel called to speak to you for a few 
moments of the nature of the Christian ministry and its claims upon young 
men in course of study, as a pursuit worthy in itself, attractive in its sur- 
roundings, noble in its results. 

I do not need to say more than a single word with regard to the nature of 
the Christian ministry. We all agree that there is a class of men set apart 
to be special representatives and spokesmen for God — to make known his 
will, to vindicate his claims, to proclaim his goodness, to win men to his 
service and love. There have been false priests and ministers, but they have 
only been counterfeits of the true, and their success has been possible only 
because there is an instinct in the human heart that bids it hope and wait 
for a revelation from God. The world has bowed to priests more than it 
ever has to kings, and that for the reason that the world has always recog- 
nized that its highest, grandest interests lay in the unseen and eternal. And 
now to be a true interpreter of this unseen universe to men who long eagerly 
to solve its problems, to be the messenger of forgiveness and peace from 
this dread yet loving God, from whom men know themselves to be exiled 
and banished by reason of transgression, to be the divinely appointed helper 
of all righteousness and herald of immortal life to the sorrowing and perish- 
ing, — this is a higher vocation than any other known to men, by as much 
as it has to do with grander themes and more important destinies. Other 
callings, however noble, have to do with the finite and temporal,- — this with 
the infinite and eternal. He who is honored with this calling is the partner 
of the living God in that work for the doing of which the floor of the heavens 
was laid with its mosaic of constellations, and the curtain of night and 
chaos rose at the creation. 

But let my position and aim be fully understood. I do not take for 
granted that it is the bounden duty of all men, or even of all Christian men, 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 271 

to be ministers of the gospel. "No man taketh this honor unto himself, but 
he that is called of God, as was Aaron." The Scripture tells us that "there 
was a man sent from God whose name was John," and that single sentence, 
like some painter's first rough sketch of a great picture, expresses, even more 
vividly than the finished portraiture, the essential secret of his life and 
work. John the Baptist was great, not only because he was commissioned 
by God, but because he knew and fulfilled this divine commission. But 
what was true of John's call may be true also of thousands whose special 
vocation is different from his. There are other callings, and many of them, 
in which men serve their generation by the will of God. Indeed, every man 
is called of God to do some special work for him, whether it be at the car- 
penter's bench, or on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war, or amid the strifes 
of the forum, whether by selling goods, or by healing men's bodily diseases, 
or by extending the area of scientific knowledge. And every man may find 
out what his calling is, and have the nobleness that comes from working 
consciously in the line of the divine purposes. Even though you may not 
be called to public preaching of the gospel, still you are called. As you 
value your interests for time and eternity, learn what it is for which Go<J 
has created you and sent you into the world, and then give yourself body 
and soul to the work which he has for you to do. 

But I am persuaded that God's call to enter the ministry is a commoner 
one than we think, — and that this call is often ignored by those to whom it 
comes, or if not ignored, at least questioned and resisted. This arises partly 
from wrong conceptions of the method in which the call is made known. 
Young men fancy that that call consists in some audible voice, or physical 
impression, or supernatural conviction of duty. I venture to say that many 
men are called who have never known any of these. Let us remember that 
God's Spirit works from within, not from without. The Spirit does not 
supersede our own faculties, but energizes and works through them. Him- 
self inaudible and invisible, he makes us hear and see what truth and duty 
are. But then, if we be naturally timid and distrustful, our convictions of 
religious duty will partake of this timidity and distrust. We shall have to 
weigh evidence and act according to the balance of probability. In this 
matter of determining whether we are called to the ministry, therefore, just 
as in determining whether we are called to be lawyers or merchants, it 
belongs to us to consider our endowments and opportunities for culture, our 
natural and our spiritual tastes, the advice and opinion of judicious friends, 
the impulses of our hearts when we are most under the influence of the 
Spirit of God. And as, in the person called, God's work does not exclude 
but implies a natural process of consideration and judgment, so it does not 
exclude but implies the cooperation of others. That was a strange notion 
of divine sovereignty which used to forbid the mother from praying for her 
own child, or urging him to become a Christian. As if that would interfere 
with God's work ! God's work in turning the sinner involves our work of 
tvarning and kindly invitation. And so God's work of calling men into the 
ministry of the gospel involves our work of seeking out young men, and lay- 
ing before them the needs of the world and the claims of the Christian 
ministry. Of old, the churches selected fit men and laid upon them this 
responsibility, and when they fled from it, hunted for them until they found 



272 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 

them and obtained their submission to the voice of the congregation. And 
modern times are not without notable instances of men whose first thought 
of preaching has been suggested by the formal action of the church to which 
they belonged. Mistakes have sometimes without doubt been made, and 
the voice of the church is not final and authoritative. There must be the 
inward feeling of the candidate himself responding to this call, if it does not, 
indeed, precede it. But this is what I urge — not only the privilege but the 
duty of Christian people to seek out those who have natural gifts for the 
ministry and who are providentially situated so that they can prepare for it, 
and to lay upon them the responsibility of considering and deciding whether 
God does not call them to devote themselves to the work of preaching the 
gospel to their fellow-men. It is our business to say to such young men. not 
that it is their duty to preach Christ's gospel, but that it is their duty to 
consider whether this may not be their duty, and, as a help to such consid- 
eration, set before them the real nature of ministerial work and the mani- 
fold arguments which incite a lover of Christ to enter upon it. 

Such influence on my part and yours, is needful to counteract false impres- 
sions which have become prevalent in our day — impressions which work ro 
the prejudice of the ministry, when its claims are considered by young men in 
course of study. We live in an age when the outward is all absorbing. In the 
rush and noise and show of our money-getting time, the pursuits that are 
intellectual and spiritual constantly tend to be undervalued. Palpable 
results are sought, and it is deemed a hardship to spend in study the early 
years that might be employed in learning a trade or in gaining practical 
acquaintance with business. And so we have thousands of men successful 
so far as accumulation of property is concerned, who utterly lack the culture 
which would enable them to enjoy or to use their gains — men who know 
nothing but business and have no mental resources — men shriveled and dried 
up at fifty, when with early education their minds might be green and bring 
forth fruit in old age. In this over-active time it is forgotten that precocity 
of worldly development is really narrowing to the soul. Does the time of 
preparation for work in the ministry consume many years of youth? Well, 
it only prepares for a more vigorous and broad and joyful manhood— devol- 
opes internal resources of knowledge and sympathy — opens deeper foun- 
tains of beneficent and holy influence. You have one only life on earth to 
live. Take time to make your preparations thorough. You have one only 
edifice of character and work to build. Take time to lay the foundations 
solid and strong. Learn a lesson from Jesus, fie had the greatest work 
man ever had to do. Yet he waited calmly till his thirty years of preparation 
were finished, before he began it. If God had designed you to begin your 
work before the time set for the finishing of your studies, he would certainly 
have had you born earlier. Since he has waited so long for your appear- 
ance upon the stage, he can wait a few years longer till you arc fully ready 
to serve him. 

There are undoubtedly infelicities in the life of the minister of the gospel, 
and no man can serve Christ in the ministry without making great sacrifices. 
The ordinary minister must resign the hope of luxury and ease. Even the 
most successful will find that success is purchased only by care and labor. 
But is it different in other pursuits? Are not the great fortunes won by 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 273 

prolonged and excessive toil? And what proportion of those who enter 
upon the professions or upon trade achieve a competence? A celehrated 
Wall Street merchant told me that not one in a hundred that set up business 
in the street survived the vicissitudes of twenty years. The vast majority 
lost property and hope. The great money-marts are strewn with wrecks, if 
we could only see them. While the ministry offers few golden prizes, it 
does offer as safe and sure a support to a faithful man as business does. As 
the result of extensive observation it can be said that "they that wait upon 
the Lord shall not want any good thing." Levi had no portion with the 
tribes, but the Lord was his inheritance. What David said of the righteous 
in general is even more true of the ministers of the gospel: "I have not 
seen them forsaken, nor their seed begging bread." 

But since there are popular impressions of the sort I have mentioned, it 
is no more than fair to oppose to these certain undoubted advantages and 
felicities of the minister's lot. I do this, not to give a rose-colored picture 
of clerical life, not to influence any man to enter the ministry from worldly 
motives, but simply to counteract and counterbalance the false notions 
insensibly received from others. I feel that I can do this from experience 
as well as from observation, since I know of one ministry begun with many 
forebodings and with many inward and outward trials, which proved immeas- 
urably happier than fear had prophesied, and which, now that it is past, 
fulfils the poet's declaration that "blessings brighten as they take their 
flight." We may safely compare the work of the ministry with that of other 
professions, as to the comfort of its outward surroundings, its influence upon 
the character of him who performs it, the nobility and permanence of its 
results. 

I do not know any calling in life that has so attractive an aspect at the 
start, as that of the ministry. The young physician or lawyer, after com- 
pleting his preparatory studies, has to enter upon his work as a stranger in 
the community and a competitor of those who have had the experience and 
the success of years. He seldom has the support and sympathy of influen- 
tial friends. He must first struggle for the acquaintance and confidence of 
others. His first years are happy if he can secure a bare subsistence. Only 
in middle life does he reach a generous support. Wealth and position belong 
to advanced years. But the young minister, on the other hand, begins life 
with sympathizing friends around him, limited in number only by the mem- 
bership of the church of which he is pastor — friends who are considerate 
and patient and helpful. They cheer him in his despondency and lift him 
over his failures. He has social position assured to him from the very start 
— access to the most intelligent company which his town affords, and a 
pecuniary support which suffices for the needs of a man of intellectual tastes. 
Absolved from worrying cares, and borne along by the- consciousness that 
many a kind Christian heart is praying for him, he throws himself into his 
work with heart and soul, and gains his first experience of happy and suc- 
cessful labor in the service of Christ and the church. 

But mere comfort, whether physical or intellectual, is of little importance, 
except as it assists the development of character and helps the great aims of 
life. The attainment of a symmetrical and grandly developed manhood, — 
is there any pursuit more favorable to this than that of the Christian min- 
is 



274 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 

istry? Consider the variety of circumstances and experiences through which 
the minister has to pass. He has the life of the study. It is his business 
to keep his mind full of the best thoughts of the past. To freshen his public 
discourse, there must of necessity be a constant pondering of the noblest 
literature. History unrolls her panorama before him. Science opens her 
secrets. He has opportunities for general investigation and culture, denied 
to men of other pursuits. The lawyer can hardly give his time to philosophy 
or science, without prejudicing his success in his chosen calling. But the 
minister studies these as a part of his calling. He may learn much of polit- 
ical economy, of geology, of ethics, of art. not only without hindrance to 
his work as preacher, but with positive advantage to it. And we may safely 
say that, as a rule, the clergy of the country surpass men of every other pur- 
suit in the variety of their culture. 

But, with these intellectual opportunities, there is a peculiar field for the 
life of the emotions. The minister cannot become a recluse, for he must 
constantly meet, both in public and private, with hundreds of persons of 
every age and condition, must know many of their inmost experiences 
of joy and sorrow, and in this intercourse must have his own sympa- 
thies drawn out and developed. This wide circle of association, with its 
practical calls upon the tenderest feelings of his nature, furnishes a large 
part of the joy and satisfaction of a true minister's life. The world is full 
of sorrow; every house has its skeleton. Multitudes of people, even in 
Christian churches, have no one but the minister whom they can recognize 
as friend — no other to whom they can speak freely with regard to the things 
which concern them most. The minister needs only the endowment of 
sincere interest in such persons" welfare, to find himself master of their 
hearts, — he has but to keep open ears and they will tell him their doubts 
and troubles. And the telling is relief. The minister comes back from his 
round of pastoral work, thanking God that he is permitted to live, and 
knowing that, if only that one day's work were all he is permitted to do on 
earth, he has not lived in vain. 

The Christian minister is in this way drawn out of himself, and made an 
open-hearted man. But it is not all a life of sympathy. — there is adminis- 
tration of church affairs to employ him, and the meeting of general needs 
of the community. The minister is leader of public sentiment on the great 
questions of the day. His work is to apply the law of God to public and 
private conduct. The range of his preaching is coextensive with the sphere 
of human knowledge and of human life. The word of God is inexhaustible, 
and he is to bring forth from its treasures things new and old. But he is to 
apply the principles of the word to all human relations. How profound 
the questions he must discuss ! How grand the fields of investigation opened 
before him ! How magnificent the influence he may wield, in shaping the 
thought and life of a whole community! In the last great war. the northern 
preachers were chief objects of the curses of the secession press. And the 
southern press was sagacious. It was northern preachers, quite as much 
as northern generals, that led us through to victory. They nerved the sol- 
dier's arm — they showed government to be God's ordinance — they made 
defense of country a duty owed to God. — Who that remembers those times 
can ever lend ear to the sneers of those who fancy the ministerial calling 
one of narrow opportunities for culture and influence? 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 275 

A Christian young man, reflecting upon the claims of the different pro- 
fessions, must sometimes ask : Which of these professions will be most apt 
to make me a truly religious man ? The Scripture has a sentence like this : 
Let not the rich man glory in his riches, nor the mighty man in his might, 
but let him that glorieth glory iu this, that he knoweth me — that is, knoweth 
God. To know God, this is better than to know all things else, for the 
whole universe is but a wreath of vapor formed by the breath of God's 
mouth, or a drop of dew upon the hem of his garment. What life will 
bring me nearest to God, and keep me there? Now we all know that we 
grow like what we think most of. Which of the professions makes God 
the most frequent and constant object of thought? which most drives a 
man to communion with God? I do not answer without care. I know of 
such men as Sir Matthew Hale, the keen-sighted lawyer and the Christian 
judge. His work upon the bench did not prevent his daily hours of prayer. 
I remember the story of Havelock, the English general in India, who rose 
for prayer at four o'clock in the morning when the march began at six, and 
at three when the march began at five. Yet 1 think it cannot be denied that 
in the very necessities of Scripture study, and of preaching to the needs of 
souls, the minister finds a constant incitement to the cultivation of personal 
piety, such as no other pursuit in life enjoys. Ministers, indeed, may do 
their work perfunctorily and without converse with God, but such a course 
is suicidal ; in this neglect, they cut the very sinews of their strength. If 
a man regarded prayer as the business of a life, would he serve his purpose 
best by entering other professions or by entering the ministry? And should 
we be far wrong, if we regarded a life hid with Christ in God as prior in 
importance and order to the outward labors of that life? Life first, and 
then work ! And what pursuit can be compared with the ministry for 
keeping ever before the eye this need of converse and fellowship with the 
living God? 

I almost reproach myself with having consumed so large a part of your 
time with the relations of this subject to the personal culture and growth of 
the man himself. I know it is not our own advantage that most inspires us. 
Youth has nobler impulses than this. How may I make the most of myself 
for others? how may I best make my mark on the world? how do most 
service to mankind? how bring most honor to God? — these are the decisive 
questions. And when we come to these, I think many can answer without 
hesitation: "In the Christian ministry." No other agency can take the 
place of the ministry. God has appointed it as an indispensable means of 
perfecting the church and propagating the gospel. No power of civilization 
or of the press or of the sword can ever accomplish those moral wonders 
which are brought about, when a man clothed with God's power stands up 
and pleads with beating heart and living voice that men will be reconciled 
to God. Who can look upon the vast audiences which in London and New 
York have recently been moved by the proclamation of the simple gospel, 
without believing that there are capacities of pulpit power yet undeveloped, 
and that the calling of the preacher has even a grander fnture before it 
than it has seen in the past? To move men in masses by the power of truth 
— this is the grandest work man has to do. Happy he who is called to 
engage in it. We may adapt to our purpose the simile of good Archbishop 



276 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 

Leighton, and liken the true minister to Amphion with his harp. Amphlon 
charmed the beasts by his playing, and so moved the hearts of the very 
stones that they followed his music and built themselves into a city. But 
the Christian preacher, as the Archbishop says, builds "the walls of a far 
more famed and beautiful city, even the heavenly Jerusalem, and in such a 
manner that the stones of this building, being truly and without fable 
living, and charmed by the pleasant harmony of the gospel, come of their 
own accord to take their places in the wall." 

While I deny that the outward infelicities of the preacher's calling are 
worthy of serious consideration by the side of the compensatory circum- 
stances and satisfactions which are granted him, more attention is due to the 
inward trials of his life. Here I would not conceal one atom of the truth. 
The ministry is in its very nature a life of self-sacrifice. The minister is a 
servant by the very meaning of the word — first a servant of Christ, and 
then a servant of the church for Jesus' sake. And the servant is not greater 
than his Lord. The path he treads is the same path his master trod. His 
power over men is proportioned to the extent to which he enters into their 
sorrows and mourns over their sins. He cannot fight the evil of this world 
without appreciating it — and ofttimes being weighed down in spirit by the 
mass and strength of it. Like John, he will sometimes cry: "The whole 
world lieth in wickedness." Like Jesus, he will have his Gethseinane 
anguish over the condition of human nature without God. But all this, my 
friends, is only evidence that he has entered into the mystery of the universe, 
and gained a truer, deeper knowledge of the reality of things. He who 
knows holiness and God must deeply feel the contrasts which this world's 
life presents to all that is pure and divine. The soul that never has been 
penetrated with anxieties, and has never felt the pressure of the great 
problems of existence, has not yet risen from childhood to manhood. As 
Goethe once beautifully wrote: 

" Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate, 

Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours 
Weeping upon his bed has sate, 
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers." 

And so, too, there will be times when to declare God's whole mind and will 
to men who hate the truth, will task all his nerve and courage. Many a time 
he shall go into his pulpit, feeling that he takes his life in his hand. Many 
a time he shall prepare for his preaching by struggle and tears before God. 
But these are the experiences that make men great. These are the prepara- 
tions that make men powerful. The thunderings and lightnings of the 
pulpit, that have stirred men's hearts like the peal and smoke of Sinai, were 
made possible by these inward conflicts and victories. The moving and 
melting appeals of the preacher, in which self was lost sight of, and the 
cross of Calvary filled the whole horizon with its glory and its beauty, were 
born of humiliation and supplication in the closet. Better a thousand times 
know these inward trials, than to float in air like the gossamer, and be blown 
hither and thither by every random breeze of this world's folly. May God 
make us men, and men of power in our generation, original forces to mould 
human society and turn the currents of earthly life into the channel of his 
purposes, — and with this end, let him fit us for our work by any discipline 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 277 

that he may see to be needful for us. A young and brave Christian heart 
will find not discouragement but stimulus in this knowledge that the goal 
of the preacher's life is not to be won without dust and toil. 

Out from the sorrow and sin of the world theiv sounds to-day the call 
for men to proclaim the glad news of salvation. During our late war, the 
drum was heard through our streets, and the call was uttered from pulpit 
and platform for men to fight for nationality and freedom. A great wave of 
enthusiasm swept over the land. Young men were ashamed to stay at home, 
and gave themselves joyfully to the armies of the Republic. We honor 
them to-day, and put their names side by side with those earlier heroes who 
fought and suffered and died at Lexington and Valley Forge. But there is 
a constant call for men to reinforce the thinned ranks of Christ's ministry. 
A hundred churches of note are looking in vain for fit men to lead them. 
And we have the word of the Lord himself, as he ascended to his Father: 
"Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature" — a 
word addressed to you and me as truly as to those who first listened to it. 
I remember well the time when I was first brought to consider that call. It 
flashed upon me that with every young man of suitable gifts and oppor- 
tunities the presumption ought to be that he was called to be Christ's soldier 
and servant, and that the question with him, if he was a Christian, was not: 
"Are there any reasons why I should enter upon this work?" but rather: 
"Are there any reasons why I should not enter upon it?" "I have given 
myself to Christ," I said then to myself, — "why should I not do that work 
which will most immediately and directly bear upon the advancement of 
Christ's kingdom in the world? I expect to spend an eternity in praising 
and serving him who died for me, — why should not my life in heaven and 
my life on earth be all of one piece — all devoted directly to promote the 
interests and the honor of God ? One only life have I to live ; can I make 
that life noble and beneficent in any way so well as by giving it to the min- 
istry of Jesus Christ?" Ought not these same considerations, that had 
weight with me, to have weight with some of you also? 

The other day I stood in that grand Memorial Hall which the sons of 
Harvard have built to keep green and sacred the memories of those alumni 
and students of the college who fell fighting for the unity of the nation in 
our great civil war. On marble tablets beneath carven arches I read the 
names of scores upon scores of good men and true who had died for their 
country. The great painted window shed a subdued light upon the scene, 
and I trod softly as if my footsteps might wake some sleeper from his rest. 
My eye wandered upward and caught the words from the Latin Vulgate : 
" Qui enim voluerit animam snam salvam facere, perdet earn; qui autem 
perdiderit animam suam propter me, inveniet earn." "For whosoever 
will save his life shall lose it ; and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake 
shall find it." Was not the legend true? And does it not apply to all self- 
sacrificing labor for Christ — and specially to work for Christ in the ministry ? 
Those young men whose names are now inscribed so grandly on their Alma 
Mater's roll of honor gave their lives for something grander than life — their 
country's unity and existence and honor. It was faith in freedom and free 
government that carried them through — and these things were invisible 
realities. But there is another government grander still — the kingdom of 



278 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 

our God — a kingdom which shall endure when all earthly governments shall 
crumble and perish. It is a nobler thing to give our lives to that. Those 
fallen heroes are joined now, in the nation's gratitude, with others of an ear- 
lier day who laid the foundations of our governmental system in their blood. 
Their reward is fresh and sure. But this reward of human fame is nothing 
to the reward of him who lives and dies a true soldier of Christ in the min- 
istry. His is the immortal honor that only God can give — and the ever- 
lasting thanks of fellow-creatures, whose rescue from the corruptions of 
earth and whose place at God's right hand are due tc bis faithful service in 
their behalf. Dear friends, remember that earthly honors fade Earthly 
mausoleums cease to be. To have one redeemed and deathless human soul 
as the monument of our life's work on earth, will be better than all the fame 
that has been won on all earth's fields of battle. 

There have been men who have heard God's call and who have refused 
obedience, — but it has been only to lose in character and hope and true 
success for this world — and we know not how much in the world to come. 
We cannot safely cheat God. He will have his own with usury. There was 
Erasmus. Great scholar as he was, three centuries and a half ago, in those 
troublous times when men's minds were seething with new ideas of faith 
and freedom, he cared more for ease and reputation than he did for truth. 
He might have wielded a mighty influence in behalf of the rising Reforma- 
tion, but he declared that he never was cut out for a martyr. And so while 
Luther was bold as a lion, Erasmus timidly concealed his sentiments and 
tried to be friends with the Papacy and with those who attacked it too. He 
sought ease, but both parties suspected him and denounced him, till he found 
his position of neutrality a bed of thorns instead of a bed of roses. He 
sought to guard his reputation, but he blackened it forever. Courting the 
favor of men, in a time when nothing but honest, outspoken decision for the 
right would do, his name has come to be a synonym for pusillanimity and 
moral cowardice. He sacrificed all his nobility of character, — and what did 
he gain? Nothing — absolutely nothing. He only demonstrated that he that 
findeth his life shall lose it. 

But, says one, I am ready to do God's will, — but these feeble powers of 
mine — how can they accomplish anything in a work so grand and holy as you 
suggest? Let me answer, as God answered Jeremiah, when he protested 
that he was but a child, and could not take up the work of the prophet which 
God had laid upon him. "Say not, I am a child; for thou shalt go to all 
that I shall send thee, — and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. 
Be not afraid of their faces, for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the 
Lord." Do you not remember how Jesus took the five loaves and multi- 
plied them? It was a symbol of his methods in using the gifts of his servants. 
He takes the few talents, and makes tbem enough in number to feed a mul- 
titude. He takes the weak, and makes them strong enough to confound the 
mighty. Be sure that he never sends out a soldier at his own charges. He 
equips the soldier for the battle. None of us have ever yet begun to imagine 
how much Christ can make of us for bis own glory, if we only put ourselves 
wholly into his hands. Without him we can do uothing, but we can do all 
things through Christ who strengtheneth us. 

But this address is for all. It may be that the work of preaching Christ's 



THE CLAIMS OP THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 279 

gospel, as bis chosen and official representative, is one from which by special 
circumstances you are shut out. Still you may take the spirit and lesson of 
this occasion with you. The spirit is the spirit of service, whatever the 
vocation may be. The lesson is that, giving up our life to God and for God, 
we find it to our eternal gain. We find it in part in this world. There are 
precious and sacred moments in the history of the consecrated man, when 
for a little he seems to have found his true self and to breathe already the 
atmosphere of heaven. A moment ago, all things seemed dim and unreal,— 
now he sees God and spiritual realities with perfect clearness. I can com- 
pare it to nothing better than the change which takes place when you sud- 
denly bring a microscope to a focus. The object is just before you In the 
centre of the field of view, but your object-glass is not adjusted to it— either 
you do not see it at all, or you see it very dimly. But a slight turn of the 
screw, and lo ! it comes out before you as clear and bright as if it had been 
just created. But, you say, such glimpses of truth are so rare ! "Well, they 
need not be rare. As you go on in the Christian life, the seeing habit 
will be more and more the habit of your mind — you will endure as continu- 
ally seeing him who is invisible. All labors and trials will become helpers 
to you, drawing you nearer to God and strengthening your faith. Even the 
cannon-ball that brings devastation in its track shall open for you, near the 
spot whereon you stand, some unknown spring of fresh and living water. 
What a wonderful prayer-meeting that was which the Christian general 
whom I have already mentioned held in the idol temple at Rangoon ! In 
the hand of each of the idol gods that lined the sides of the great apartment, 
his men put a torch, and by the light of these torches in the idols' hands, 
they held their worship of the Most High. So for all of us who give our 
lives to the service of God, the dark and trying events that threatened our 
peace shall be turned into torch-bearers to light up our worship and point 
out to us his way. But this is but the prophecy of another discovery to 
come. Only when we reach the city where we need no candle, neither light 
of the sun, shall we know what it is to "find our life." Christ is our life, 
and we shall find him, and with Christ we shall find all that we need — all 
that we were made for. Heaven will be the place, and eternity the time, for 
the manifestation of the sons of God. Oh, how we shall rejoice there, that 
we were willing to lose the life that was transient and earthly, for the sake 
of the life that was spiritual and eternal ! 

Just one thing more I wish to say, and that is, that this life of service to 
God may be lived by every young person before me. It is the very nature 
of the Christian life to implant within us virtues which we have not in our- 
selves, and to develop and strengthen them thereafter, until we and they are 
inseparable. You may by reason of certain experiences of temptation and 
transgression have lost all confidence in yourself. Remember that you may 
still put confidence in Christ. That is a most instructive example of Bishop 
Cranmer in the reign of Bloody Mary, the persecutor of the Protestants. 
You recollect how, in a moment of weakness and terror, he abjured the faith, 
and assented to the doctrines of the Church of Rome ; but you remember 
also how, when reason and the fear of God returned, he repented of his sin 
and suffered at the stake, holding out first into the fire the hand that had 
signed the recantation, till it was entirely consumed. Christ gave his servant 



280 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 

strength to put away all his fears, and leave evidence to the world of his 
saving power that will remain to all after ages. So there is no one of you, 
however weak he may seem to himself to be, that cannot obtain strength 
from God to stand even single-handed for the Master. "Act then — act in 
the living present, heart within, and God o'erhead," — and no man can meas- 
ure the ultimate results of your influence. 

When John Knox died, a nobleman at his grave uttered over his coffin 
this memorable sentence : "Here lies one that never feared the face of man." 
John Knox's voice had rung out like a trumpet through Scotland. Instead 
of his fearing the face of man, the wicked, even though they held the highest 
seats in the kingdom, feared him, as Herod of old feared John the Baptist. 
And what was the secret of it? Simply this, — he feared God so much, that 
no room was left for fear of man. Let this be my last word to the members 
of these Societies : ' ' Fear God, and you shall have no other fear. Honor 
God, and you shall be honored by him. Lose your lives for Christ's sake, 
and you shall find them to life eternal. And in the great coming day, they 
that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that 
turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever." 



XXIV. 
SOURCES OF SUPPLY FOE THE MINISTRY.' 



I wish to rail attention to the fact that the proportion of our thoroughly 
trained young men who enter the ministry is gradually but seriously dimin- 
ishing. The deficiency of which I speak is not confined to our own denomi- 
nation. A few months ago I collected the latest triennial catalogues of our 
leading colleges, and constructed an elaborate table of statistics, in order to 
discover the precise proportion of college graduates that chose the ministry 
as a calling in the earlier and in the later decades of their history. The 
result was surprising. Yale College in the first years of its history gave 
seventy-two per cent, of its graduates to the ministry. Fifty years ago, the 
proportion had already become reduced to thirty-one per cent. During the 
last ten years of which the triennial gives professional statistics, the propor- 
tion is only eleven per cent. Fifty years ago, Williams College gave fifty- 
nine per cent, of its graduates to the ministry, — now it gives only fifteen ; 
Amherst College shows a reduction during the same half-century from 
sixty-one per cent, to twenty-six per cent. ; Hamilton College from thirty- 
eight per cent, to twenty-three per cent. ; Brown University from thirty-two 
per cent, to seventeen per cent. ; and the University of Rochester, which in 
the first ten years of its history sent forty-six per cent, of its graduates into 
the ministry, during the last ten years of which we have a record, sends a 
proportion of only twenty-two per cent.f 

It is evident that we have before us a general fact of our times which 
ought to interest us, not only as Baptists, but as Christians. What we see 
of decline in this respect cannot be due to any special defects of method or 
administration into which our Baptist colleges have fallen. The evil is 
common to all our Christian colleges. The greatness of it may be partially 
appreciated when we consider that the result of averaging the statistics of 
the six colleges mentioned is to show that, while fifty years ago forty per 
cent, of our college graduates entered the ministry, we have now reached a 
time when only seventeen per cent, of those who have received a complete 
college training devote themselves to the ministry of the gospel. We may 



* An Address before the Rhode Island Baptist Social Union, Providence, 
May, 1877; printed in the Watchman, Boston, October, 1S78. 

t An article by Rev. George P. Morris, of Montclair, N. J., in the Inde- 
pendent of January 12, 1S8S, brings these statistics down to the date of the 
present publication, and adds much of interest. The proportion of ministers 
among the alumni of Harvard College, from 1642 to 1650, was 55 per cent. ; 
it has regularly diminished, until from 1860 to 1870, it was 8 per cent., 
and from 1870 to 1S76, it was 1.2 per cent. At Princeton, from 1748 to 
1760, it was 49 per cent: from 1S70 to 1S77. it was 18 per cent. At Yale 
College, from 1870 to 1SS0. the proportion was 8 per cent. : at Williams, 
from 1880 to 18S3, it was 12.7 per cent. : at Amherst, from 1S80 to I8S2! 
it was 13.5 per cent. These facts demonstrate that, since the above address 
was written, the decline has steadily continued. 

2S1 



282 SOURCES OF SUPPLY FOR THE MINISTRY. 

appreciate it yet more fully when we consider that while the absolute num- 
ber of students in these colleges has increased fifty per cent, during the 
half-century, the absolute number of their graduates entering the ministry 
has decreased thirty-three per cent. In other words, while our population 
has grown immensely in numbers and culture, the supply of ministers fitted 
by thorough training to meet the intellectual and spiritual demands of the 
time has not half kept pace with our growth in other respects, and is abso- 
lutely one-third smaller than it was fifty years ago. 

The instances I have cited are typical instances of our old and large 
institutions. Have other sources of supply been opened which might render 
these unnecessary? New colleges have certainly been founded, and of their 
graduates some have chosen preaching as their profession iu life. But the 
new celleges have not made up for the lack of the old ones ; they have had 
all they could do to secure a foothold ; have not graduated any comparatively 
great number of students ; above all, have not sent into the fields covered 
by the old colleges enough men to make any perceptible difference in the 
result. And in the West and South, the graduates of the younger colleges 
show no more inclination to devote themselves to the gospel ministry than 
do the graduates of those which have been longer established, — in fact, I 
think it will be found that the influences which have led at the East to the 
results I have detailed, have operated yet more powerfully at the West, so 
that the facts I have stated fairly exhibit the real condition of things 
throughout the country. 

It would be some alleviation and comfort if we could believe that, as the 
supply has decreased in numbers, there had been a counterbalancing increase 
in the native and acquired ability of those who enter upon the sacred office. 
But I fear it cannot be argued that better quality has made up for dimin- 
ished quantity. The average amount of talent in a hundred or a thousand 
young men is a pretty constant quantity. When you diminish the number, 
you diminish your chances of finding among the number men of superior 
ability. We have better schools, better methods, better training, than we 
had fifty years ago, but these do not compensate for the lack of the best sort 
of raw material. No amount of grinding or polishing will give a good edge 
to a tool of soft iron. Schools, however excellent, cannot transform second- 
rate men into first-rate ministers. And it seems to me that I perceive a 
marked and increasing disposition on the part of the ablest and most 
influential men in our college classes to turn away from the ministry to other 
pursuits, so that the proportion of talent entering the ministry is even less 
than the proportion of numbers. 

But are there not a multitude of ministers who can find no pastoral charge? 
I am reminded of an anecdote of Daniel Webster. He was asked by a young 
man who proposed to study law, whether there was any room at the bar. 
"O, yes," said Mr. Webster, "plenty of room, high up!" So there might 
be a minister at every cross-road, and yet a thousand churches be begging in 
vain for pastors thoroughly fitted for their work. Of this last sort there is 
no overplus, but a great and constantly increasing dearth. The culture of 
our communities has proceeded faster than the culture of our ministry. We 
must provide a more advanced culture, and we must give the best brains of 
our sons to receive it, or the civilization of the age will run away from tha 
church. 



SOURCES OF SUPPLY FOR THE MINISTRY. 283 

Let us face the problem. We have before us a phenomenon of our times 
— a continually growing tendency among our educated young men to enter 
upon other vocations rather than the ministry. I wish, if possible, to assign 
some of the chief causes of this tendency, that we may wisely labor to coun- 
teract it. It seems to me that we shall not reach the root of the matter 
unless we grant that for this general phenomenon of our Christianity, which 
manifests itself in Germany and England as well as in the United States, we 
must find a subtle, potent and pervasive cause in the philosophical spirit of 
our time. Every generation has its philosophy. Man knows two things, 
body and soul, matter and mind; and according as one or the other absorbs 
his attention, he becomes a materialist or an idealist. But neither material- 
ism or idealism by itself can long content the thinker, and so the pendulum 
of philosophic thought swings between the two extremes. Not half a century 
ago the idealistic transcendentalism of Germany was the great danger 
against which we had to guard. But this generation of Germans has seen 
the lecture-rooms of the Hegelian philosophers deserted. Physical science is 
taught in them now. The pendulum has swung to the materialistic extreme. 
The current philosophy in scientific circles is a philosophy of the senses. 
Matter is all and in all. Or if mind and matter be distinguishable, they are 
both but the opposite sides or manifestations of an unknowable force, which 
is conceived of under physical analogies, so that the priority of spirit is 
practically denied. 

The late lamented President Talbot used to say that he liked metaphysics, 
because they had to do with realities. Our age denies the very existence of 
those realities with which intellectual and moral philosophy has to do. A 
mist has risen from the low grounds of physical research, and has obscured 
the great spiritual facts and existences in presence of which the human spirit 
used to rejoice and tremble. Our literature is full of evolution and natural 
law, — but the God who works miracles, and has personal dealings with the 
soul, is far away. The young men in our colleges get ideas from Herbert 
Spencer, as well as from the Sabbath sermon. They may be Christian young 
men, and their faith may not be absolutely destroyed, — the Christian college 
is the best of all places to meet the infidel reasoning, and to overcome it. 
Yet these young men breathe the atmosphere of their time, and it is an 
atmosphere of doubt and questioning. Is it a wonder that the unseen and 
eternal should become so dimmed to their vision, that a life devoted to 
teaching about these invisible things should seem hardly substantial enough 
to attract them? 

And while the hold of spiritual realities is weakened, the material progress 
of the age strongly impresses the youthful mind. Commerce and invention' 
have opened many a new world to the enthusiastic adventurer. Years ago 
there used to be only three learned professions — law, medicine, and theol- 
ogy. But there are a dozen to-day. Architecture, the fine arts, literature, 
journalism, chemistry, banking, mining, offer brilliant prizes to the capable 
and industrious — prizes compared with which the returns of the pastorate 
seem very meagre and precarious, and the life of the pastorate very narrow 
and confined. The world has shot forward along the line of industrial dis- 
covery and achievement. Railroading and manufactures require a very high 
order of genius and discipline to organize and conduct them, and thesa 



284 SOURCES OF SUPPLY FOR THE MINISTRY. 

pursuits offer pecuniary compensations which the ministry cannot. The 
style of living in which cultivated people indulge has advanced in elaborate- 
ness and expensiveness much faster than the minister's salary has increased. 
All these things our young men see. To the best of the Christian students 
in our colleges, Satan offers, as he offered to Christ, all the kingdoms of the 
world and the glory of them, if they will but choose a secular calling rather 
than the ministry. I almost wonder that, in this stage of materialistic 
thought and of physical progress, any are found to give themselves to Christ's 
service as preachers of His gospel. I should actually wonder, if I did not 
know that young hearts are not always sordid and sellish, and that the Spirit 
of Christ can touch them with the fire of self-sacrificing love. Let us appre- 
ciate the nature of the decision, when the spirit of the age yields to the Spirit 
of Christ, and our young men give up their hopes of worldly preferment to 
engage in a service so self-denying as that of the average ministry. 

The second cause of the diminishing supply of educated men for the min- 
istry is to be found in what I may call the secularization of our colleges. 
That I may not seem to use this phrase in any invidious sense, let me explain 
my meaning. It is a fact we need to consider, that even our Christian col- 
leges, as distinguished from State institutions, have been more and more 
becoming places of secular, rather than religious, training. This is partly an 
incident of their general advance in methods. In early days the college was 
looked upon chiefly as a feeder for the ministry ; it was indeed a college and 
a theological seminary combined. If others than incipient preachers studied 
in it, they were those who had in view one of the other learned professions, 
law or medicine. Now it is a mark of progress, upon which we ought to 
congratulate ourselves, that all classes of the community are coming to feel 
the advantages of a thorough education, and the farmer, the manufacturer 
and the merchant desire their sons to have a liberal training, even though 
they are to follow the calling of their fathers. The colleges have felt this 
demand, and have opened their doors to all. They give a broader and more 
varied culture than they gave fifty years ago. They have widened the range 
of their curriculum to embrace the new science of the day, at the same time 
that they have widened the compass of their halls to take in the candidates 
for every conceivable human calling. 

The results of this are easily seen. The colleges have now a smaller pro- 
portion of Christian students. Much of the instruction formerly given in 
Biblical studies and in Christian doctrine is given no longer. The theological 
seminary has sprung up to give a specifically theological training, and as the 
college and the seminary have become more and more differentiated, the 
•*work formerly done by the one is relegated to the other. No college that I 
know of has any such course of sermons on the Christian evidences and on 
the Christian doctrine, as Dr. Timothy Dwight preached in the chapel of 
Yale College a hundred years ago. The young collegian who proposes to 
study law has no such instruction in theology as legal fledglings had then. 
Then many a lawyer had tastes for Biblical and theological study awakened 
in college which afterwards led to theological authorship, and reacted pow- 
erfully and beneficially upon the work of his chosen profession. It would 
be well if the men of other professions could have some such training in 
theology now. Why is it that all other sciences are supposed to form a 



SOURCES OF SUPPLY FOR THE MINISTRY. 2S5 

necessary part of a liberal education, while no place can be found in a col- 
lege curriculum for the most important of all, the science of God? 

So the college has become more collegiate, and the theological seminary 
more theological. It is the old principle of the division of labor. But it 
has its disadvantages. With a greater proportion of students bent on secular 
pursuits, there has been a natural diversion of thought from religion itself. 
Instructors being chosen not so much for their religious spirit as for their 
competence in special departments of teaching, there is naturally a less 
regard on their part for the religious welfare of the students under their 
care. The days of widespread revival in our colleges, those days of strug- 
gle and prayer when the college world was shaken to its foundations, and 
universal awe was felt at the manifest presence of God, are almost things of 
the past. Those were the days when young men felt the claims of Christ 
and his ministry, and in submitting themselves to God, gave themselves 
also to the preaching of the gospel. Now the secular element is so dominant 
that a strong public sentiment in behalf of religion is difficult to arouse. 
The Christian element among students and professors holds its own, but it 
does little more. I am perfectly aware that the old curriculum and the old 
methods can never be restored, but I trust in God that the day will come 
when the old revival spirit will fall upon our colleges, and when each of 
them may have for its motto the old legend upon the seal of Harvard, 
" Christo et eeelesice." The studies of the colleges may be secular, but 
their spirit may be religious. These colleges were all founded in prayer 
and tears, by men of God who felt that education without religion was 
not only no true education, but was a curse to those who received it. I 
cannot believe that the spirit of the founders has spent itself and is gone. 
But it greatly needs to be revived, and for this every Christian should 
devoutly pray, for the future of the Christian cause is bound up with the 
religious condition of our colleges. 

I wish now to speak of a third and last cause for the disinclination of our 
educated young men to enter the ministry, namely, a gradual change of view 
among the members of our churches with regard to the ministry itself as a 
divine calling. I do not now refer to the disappearance of that adventitious 
dignity of ecclesiasticism which once surrounded the minister and separated 
him in the popular regard from all others of human kind. We who live in 
this generation can hardly picture to ourselves the solemn sanctity that inves- 
ted his office in old New England days. That was a time when, the moment 
the minister and his family left the parsonage to walk to the church on Sab- 
bath days, every parishioner, young and old, stood still by the road-side 
with uncovered head until the procession passed. When the minister's 
family filed into the meeting-house two by two, the whole congregation rose 
to receive them, and remained standing until the minister had taken his 
seat in the pulpit, and his family had taken their seats in the pew. That 
old ecclesiasticism often bolstered up a miserable sloth and formality, and 
though it originated in real reverence for sacred things, it tended to with- 
draw the minister from the sympathies of his people and to hinder his real 
Influence. Rather than have those days return, it were better that the min- 
ister should stand wholly upon his merits, and that he should have no influ- 
ence but that which his personal character and his faithfulness in preaching 
the word of God might give him. 



286 SOURCES OF SUPPLY FOR THE MINISTRY. 

All this is true, and yet I fear our people have gone too far to the other 
extreme — I mean the extreme of holding that there is no sacredness attach- 
ing to the office of Christ's minister, and no divine calling except that which 
consists in gifts. In our revulsion from the theory of apostolic succession 
and from the error of supposing grace to be transmitted through human 
fingers, some have gone to the opposite extreme of denying that any grace 
is bestowed by God. In short, there is a theory of the minister's vocation 
which would deprive the word "vocation" of all its proper meaning. Instead 
of being a calling, the ministry is regarded as a mere pursuit or profession, 
like any other pursuit or profession in which men employ themselves. The 
only calling is gifts, and these gifts are self -given. The minister ceases to 
be an ambassador of God, separated from his birth unto the gospel of God, 
endowed with special helps, and clothed with special authority from God. 

See how this change of view affects young men as they contemplate the 
ministry. All sense of the honor of God's calling, and the solemnity of a 
relation to God so intimate as that of his spokesman and representative, 
ceases at once. That great attraction of the ministry, which has led many a 
lofty-minded young man to prefer its labors and trials to all earthly pleas- 
ure and fame and power, is gone forever, so soon as we iguore the fact of a 
divine call to assume its responsibilities. Only then, when we regard it as 
a vocation to which God points the soul by his providence and Spirit, does 
obedience to his will become blessed, and resistance to his will, dreadful. 
To me, this increasing unbelief in a divine call to the ministry seems one of 
the most serious signs of the times. When God calls a man, there we may 
be sure that natural gifts will not be absent; but I protest that, though a 
man might have the natural gifts of a Fenelon or of a Paul, we have no right 
to ordain him, and he has no right to seek ordination, unless beyond and 
above this possession of natural gifts, the secret conviction has been in some 
way wrought into his heart that he is called of God to the ministry, and he 
can say: "Woe is me, if I preach not the gospel!" This belief that the 
minister of Christ is divinely called to his work, we need to restore to its 
true place in the minds of the young men of our colleges and of our churches. 
Only when they appreciate the sublime dignity of God's calling, will they 
feel that "he that desireth the office of bishop desireth a good work," 
and that this work is one so surpassing all earthly vocations that they may 
well desire it for themselves. 

I have left but a brief space to indicate certain possible remedies for this 
sad disposition on the part of our young men of talent and culture to desert 
the ministry of the gospel. Let this part of my paper take the form of ap- 
plication, first to the ministers, and secondly to the laymen of our churches. 
It lies In the power of the ministry itself to increase the number of 
ministers, by simply making the ministry attractive. There is a querulous 
spirit discernible here and there among our ministers, a jealous, envying 
spirit, a discontented and ambitious spirit, which has its root in unbelieving 
forgetfulness of God's promises, and a dimmed apprehension of God's truth. 
I have heard good men lament, in a way that no struggling lawyer or physi- 
cian would ever indulge in, their Inadequate support, and the small respect 
that was paid them. But the only way to get respect is to be respectable, 
and the trials of the ministry are far more easily borne when a manly spirit 



SOURCES OP SUPPLY FOR THE MINISTRY. 2S7 

Is summoned up to bear them. I have heard ministers complain that they 
were compelled to hawk themselves about, as slaves at Southern auction- 
blocks used to cry to this denier and to that: "Buy me! buy me!" But I 
have heard also of a certain slave in ancient Greece, who, under similar cir- 
cumstances, when asked what his strong points were, said proudly, "I can 
rule men; whoso wants a master, let him buy me!" In the early centuries, 
Christians sold themselves into slavery, in order that they might obtain 
access for the gospel to the houses of noble masters, and so bring these very 
masters into submission to Christ. Let the Christian minister so reverence 
his calling, that the selling of himself to a church shall seem a small price to 
pay for this mastery of men ! 

But above and beyond this high estimate of his vocation, there needs 
earnest endeavor to walk worthily of it. Men are to be reached by living 
thought — thought that will waken the intellect and stir the heart. The 
minister must be a thinking being. He must substitute thought for com- 
monplace. Nothing will so divest the ministry of its attractiveness to young 
men as cant in the pulpit, or the indolent retailing of the thoughts of other 
men. If the preacher does his own thinking, he will be apt to be independ- 
ent in the expression of his thought. He will be no sycophant to public 
opinion. And yet his freedom will be freedom in the truth; not individual 
dogmatism, but continual reference to the authority of Scripture, and the 
backing up of what is urged as truth by a "Thus saith the Lord," — this is 
the freedom that gives the preacher power. Such freedom as this will be 
accompanied by humility of spirit. The messenger will be hidden behind 
his message. His fervor will not be the self-moved enthusiasm of high 
animal spirits and merely natural sympathy ; it will be that penetrating and 
irresistible earnestness which the unction and power of the Holy Spirit alone 
can give. Under God, our ministry have the recruiting of their ranks in 
their own hands. When they are commanded to commit the gospel to 
faithful men who shall be able to teach others also, they can with God's help 
fulfill the commission. And they can do it, by making full proof of their 
own ministry. Let them be filled with the Spirit and give themselves 
wholly to their work, and no king upon his throne can wield such influence 
or win so high regard. Under the hands of such a preacher, young men 
will come to take his view of the ministry, and will count it their highest 
honor to enter it. 

But my second application of this subject is to laymen. The rank and 
file of the churches have duties in this matter also. They must call forth 
the ministers of the coming generation. God's call no more renders unnec- 
essary man's call here, than God's regenerating agency renders human 
agency unnecessary in bringing sinners into the kingdom. In the first 
centuries the churches used to feel their duty in this regard, and when pas- 
tors were needed, they used to lay the burden of preaching the gospel upon 
young men of proper native endowments, even when these young men were 
themselves reluctant to accept the charge. When they fled in order to 
escape, the churches sent their messengers after them, brought them back, 
and as it were, compelled them to serve in the ministry. The one great 
ancient church-orator, Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, was chosen thus. 
And in our own day and in our own denomination, Dr. William R. Williams, 



2S8 SOURCES OF SUPPLY FOR THE MINISTRY. 

that prince of preachers, was called after a similar fashion, his church sum- 
marily electiug him its pastor, when he was in full practice of the law. We 
must do more than we now do to make our j'oung men feel their responsibil- 
ity in this regard. We must convince them that the burden of proof rests 
upon them ; what good reason can they give why they should not serve Christ 
as preachers of his gospel? The putting of this question would oftener than 
we think reveal the fact that God had already gone before us, and had been 
stirring the young man's mind, if not with yearnings, at least with appre- 
hensions, that in that direction his duty might lie. 

But the layman's responsibility does not cease with the exertion of his 
personal influence to induce the brightest young men of the churches to 
enter the ministry ; he must also do his part to provide them with proper 
training for their work. One of the great duties of the laity of the present 
day is to demand proper qualifications of mental discipline and sound doc- 
trine in those who are to be their teachers. And since the majority of young 
men cannot make these qualifications their own without long courses of 
study, it is the additional duty of the laity to see that the means for pursu- 
ing these studies are provided. While the standard of preparation is so high, 
young men cannot, without danger to health and without injury to their 
scholastic work, support themselves during this preliminary training by thi- 
labor of their own brains or hands. When they give up all hope of secular 
advancement in order to prepare themselves for the ministry, it is only fit 
that they should be maintained by the churches they expect to serve. Their 
time is precious, — the churches must economize it, and get them into their 
work at the earliest possible day. And then comes in the need of institutions 
where they may be trained under Christian teachers — institutions academ- 
ical, collegiate, and theological — institutions thoroughly endowed, equipped, 
manned, and supported. As, in prospect of a famine, Joseph laid up in store- 
houses the provision for future years, so the churches must provide against 
a threatened famine of the word of God, by treasuring up the means and 
instruments of Christian education. 

Men and institutions, — brethren of the laity, we look to you for these ! 
But we look to you for something more vitally important still. I mean for 
that personal faith and prayer which alone can change the tone and spirit 
of our times, and cause the hearts of our best and noblest youth to turn, as 
by an irresistible gravitation, to the ministry of the gospel. Our Lord has 
bidden us pray for laborers. I fear that prayer has been disused of late. 
While we do our part in urging upon young men the solemnity of the obli- 
gation that rests upon them to decide their duty in this matter in the sight 
of God, let us feel our dependence upon him in whose hand are all the 
hearts of men, and who turneth them, as the little rivulets of the eastern 
fields are turned, by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the hus- 
bandman. The permanent and sufficient remedy for all our needs and 
dangers is to be found only in a turning of the heart of the church to God, 
and a turning of the heart of our youth by God. May these insufficient 
words of mine help us to appreciate the vast importance of the work that is 
thus laid upon us, — and to this work, as Abraham Lincoln said at Gettys 
burg, "let us dedicate ourselves." 



XXV. 
THE LACK OF STUDEiNTS FOR THE MINISTRY/ 



Not long since, I received a letter from a young man who graduated from 
our Seminary only three years ago, saying that within the past year six 
different churches, all of them strong and largo, had made him pressing 
overtures, urging him to leave his present place and to become their pastor. 
And yet, on the same day that I received this letter, a prominent layman in 
one of our country churches told me that when his pastor recently resigned, 
the church received a flood of letters from ministers in all parts of the State, 
offering themselves as candidates for the vacant pastorate. I beg you put 
these facts together. Ministers enough and to spare, of a certain sort — ■ 
uneducated men, men who cannot preach, men who cannot stay more than 
a year or two in a place — but such a lack of trained and competent men, 
that the strong churches find pastors only by robbing one another, and a 
famine of the word of God impends unless this lack of ministers is supplied. 

What are the figures? Simply these: In 1832, fifty years ago, there were 
in the United States 3, GOO Baptist ministers to 5,300 churches, or 1,700 more 
churches than ministers. In 1882, there were 16,000 ministers to 26,000 
churches, or 10,000 more churches than ministers, while the proportion of 
ministers to church members had declined 25 per cent. During the last ten 
years there have been reported in our year-books 4,500 ordinations to the 
ministry ; during those same ten years . our Theological Seminaries have 
graduated not more than 1,000 men, so that not one quarter of those who 
have entered the ministry have had a full course of training. Our popula- 
tion has been largely increasing, yet in sixteen Northern Baptist Colleges 
we had in 1882 only 1,582 students, as compared with 1,694 in the year 
1872 — that is, a loss of seven per cent, in the last ten years. In 1872, there 
were in these colleges 408 students for the ministry ; last year there were 
only 294, — that is, a loss within ten years of 28 per cent. Within fifty years 
the proportion of college graduates entering the ministry of all evangelical 
denominations has dropped from 46 to 17 per cent., while in two of our prin- 
cipal Baptist colleges it has declined 42 to 20 per cent. Twelve years 
ago, or as early as 1871, a writer in the Bibliotheca Sacra called attention to 
the decreasing number of trained men entering the ministry. But the evil is 
far greater to-day than it was twelve years ago. The sum and substance of 
It is that young men of culture and promise are ceasing to enter the minis- 
try, and that while our church membership has increased several fold, the 
supply of educated ministers has greatly diminished, and is still continuing 
to diminish. 



* An address delivered at the meeting of the New York Baptist State Con- 
vention, Buffalo, October 25, 1883. 

19 2S9 



290 THE LACK OF STUDENTS FOR THE MINISTRY. 

The result is that a multitude of weak men and of half-trained men are 
pressing into the ministry. We are not getting as good material in our 
Seminaries as we got twenty years ago. Men come to us without college 
training; or, if they come from the colleges, they are not in general the 
strongest men. We have some men — a few — as good as we have ever had. 
but these are the exceptions. We can take only what is given us, and 
neither the churches nor the colleges are giving us as many men, nor as able 
men, as they once did. Yet the demand for men even of imperfect training 
is so great that the student is tempted by the offers of some admiring church 
to cut short his brief period of study, and to enter the ministry before he 
half knows what he is to preach. Our strong churches And it very hard to 
secure fit pastors ; they spend months and sometimes even years of their 
history in search of them ; when they do secure one who pleases their 
fancy, they often learn too late that his resources fit him only for temporary 
success ; they are not long content with his imperfect work, and they soon 
seek a new pastor; and amid all this weakness and change the hold of the 
church upon the thoughtful and active minds in the community is lost, and 
after ten or twenty years facts show that the church has gone backward, 
both in numbers and in influence. 

We want pastors of mental grasp and thorough culture, to instruct and 
lead our stronger churches. Where shall we look for them? To the Sem- 
inaries? But the Seminaries — where shall they find them? In the col- 
leges? But who will furnish them to the colleges? You would naturally 
answer : Just such churches as need their services. In other words, if the 
strong churches need able and cultivated pastors, the strong churches ought 
to furnish the ministry with recruits of this sort from their own number ; 
from their own families, at least the raw material for ministers should come. 
Does it come from such churches? I answer: Hardly to an appreciable 
extent. Almost all the students of our Seminaries come from the small 
country churches, and from the families of the poor. I belong to the First 
Baptist Church of Rochester. The church lives under the shadow of the 
University and the Theological Seminary. I asked one of our deacons the 
other day how many young men had entered the ministry during the last 
forty years from the families of our First Baptist Church. "Well," said 
he, "there is you." "Yes," I said, "and who else Is there?" And he 
could mention no other. I love the church to which I belong, and I speak 
of it only because I believe it an illustration and sample of many others — 
of almost all our large and well to do churches throughout the State and the 
land. But I ask: Is it right for these large churches to be always taking 
and never giving — depending upon others to give them their ministers, but 
furnishing no ministers themselves? Is not something wrong, when a strong 
church does nothing toward filling up the ranks of the ministry? If it has 
a half dozen ministers in forty years, ought it not to raise up from its own 
number at least another half dozen ministers, to supply the wants of other 
fields? 

Where is the difficulty? What is the cause of the trouble 1 It is simply 
this: We have forgotten that we have anything to do with respect to the 
reinforcement of the ministry. We have said to ourselves : The law of sup- 
ply and demand will take care of that. We have forgotten that the law of 



THE LACK OF STUDENTS FOR THE MINISTRY. 291 

supply and demand has its foundation in the purely selfish interests of nun, 
and that without the working of God's Spirit upon human hearts, the great- 
er the need of an unselfish ministry, the smaller will be the supply. Or we 
have said to ourselves : God will take care of this matter, — when he wants a 
minister he will call him. Yes, and when he wants a man to be a Christian 
he will call him. But it will not be without your help. You must go to 
that man and plead with him, if you ever expect him to be saved. So It is 
not enough for us to preach the gospel ourselves. We are bound to "com- 
mit it to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also." Nothing 
good in this fallen world will take care of itself. Eternal vigilance is the 
price of liberty. So the church is divine ; but its doctrines, its ordinances, 
its offices, its privileges, are given to us to defend and maintain. When we 
withdraw our hand and leave any of these interests to chance, then God's 
cause will go down. 

We have forgotten both our own personal duty and our dependence upon 
God. There is the plain command of Christ, to pray the Lord of the har- 
vest that he send laborers into his harvest. How frequently have you heard 
that prayer in public worship during the past twenty years? How fre- 
quently have you poured out your soul in private for the same blessing? Is 
the day of prayer for colleges observed in your church? Do mothers and 
fathers pray God that their sons may be ministers? I have been reading of 
Hannah, -#nd of the answer to her prayer in the birth of Samuel, the child 
whose very name meant 'asked of God." Hannah's song of inspired praise 
and her sacrifice of her son to God, when he was her only one, prove to me 
that it was God's cause for which she prayed, and not simply that her own 
reproach might be taken away. Israel had reached a low state, when the 
very high priest of the nation had complicity with iniquity. Hannah prayed 
for the turning back of this tide of sin, and for the establishment of the 
kingdom of God ; and her prayer was answered in the birth of no common 
child, and in his doing of no common work for God, — for Samuel was the 
first of the prophets, and the setter-up of the kingdom in Israel. 

How many mothers and fathers are praying now that out of the number of 
their children God will raise up one, large in mind and heart, sanctified from 
his birth, filled with the Spirit of God, that he may stand between the liv- 
ing and the dead, be the mouth-piece of the Almighty, proclaim Christ and 
his unsearchable riches, lead the perishing to the Lamb of God that taketh 
away the sin of the world? How many are willing to let strangers care for 
them in their old age, if their sons may be only preaching the everlasting 
gospel? How many, when they think of their children's future, look 
beyond the meat that perisheth, and wish most of all that their sons may 
feed upon the word of God, and may impart it to others, as Christ broke the 
five loaves to the hungry multitude? Ah, thank God, there are some! Dr. 
Robinson, of New York, tells us of a mother whose long continued prayer 
brought no answer, though her son had graduated from college, and had 
begun to teach. But at last he was converted, and with his conversion 
came the desire and purpose to preach the gospel. He came fifty miles to 
bring his mother word. Then for the first time she told him how, in send- 
ing a missionary-box to the heathen, when he was a child, she had enclosed 
one of his little garments, and with it had sent a note begging the mission- 



292 THE LACK OF STUDENTS FOR TUE MINISTRY. 

ary to join his prayers to hers, and never to cease until the child that had 
worn that little garment was made a disciple of Christ, aud a minister of his 
gospel. 

Some such mothers there are, but are there many such? Do we long to 
have our sons ministers of Christ, with all the trials incident to that voca- 
tion, or do we wish them to be successful merchants, lawyers, journalists, 
physicians? Ah, I look upon the families of our well-to-do and educated 
men, and I see almost no sons of theirs entering the ministry. I look upon 
the graduating classes of our colleges, and I see only the weak, the lame, 
the halt, the blind, willing to lay themselves upon God's altar. I look upon 
our largest city churches, and I find it the rarest exception if one of them 
gives a candidate to the ministry. We want the best gifts, the best train- 
ing, the hest social culture in the ministry. "We look for such most natu- 
rally to these families, these colleges, these churches. But we find Christian 
parents urging their sons not to preach, rather than encouraging them to it ; 
college presidents glorifying other professions at the expense of the minis- 
try, till it seems to their students a mean thing to preach the gospel ; Chris- 
dan churches looking everywhere else for ministers but to the young men 
of their own number. 

I have heard it said that this is all due to the lack of heroic spirit in our 
age, and West Point has been referred to as an example. There, as I am 
informed, the quality of the students has greatly deteriorated since ten, 
fifteen, twenty years ago. Other professions hold out greater prizes than 
the profession of arms. Engineering and art, chemistry and the service of 
great corporations, offer far quicker promotion and greater salaries than can 
be found in army life. And some would have us believe that it is so in the 
ministry. Young men cannot make enough, in preaching Christ, and so 
they will not preach. I am unwilling to believe it of the young men of our 
time. I do not believe that they are all 'dudes,' devoid of all generous ambi- 
tion, worshipers only of the almighty dollar. No, I remember how war 
stirred our pulses once, and how the need of sacrifices for the country 
brought thousands of brave men into the field, ready to fight, and if need 
be, to die. I believe it is the inertness and uselessness of military life in 
time of peace that keep the best men from West Point to-day, — and I believe 
that, if the young men of our churches could only hear the trumpet-call to 
heroic service in the ministry, they would flock to the standard, ready for 
any labor and any sacrifice. 

Why do not young men feel thus? Because they are not better than the 
churches around them. Because the churches themselves do not properly 
estimate the dignity and the need of the ministry. They have forgotten 
that the minister is directly called by God, intrusted with God's words, 
endowed with God's spirit. Fathers and mothers have forgotten that 'he 
who desires the office of a bishop desires a good thing; " that it is an infinite 
honor to any son of theirs to be called to that high office; that there is a 
satisfaction in being used to bring men from eternal death to eternal life, 
that passes all the satisfaction of this world ; and that to give up all for 
Christ and his kingdom is to gain all for time and eternity. Ah, we should 
pray, if we reverenced the ministerial office; and we should reverence the 
ministerial office, if we simply believed God's word with regard to the lost 



THE LACK OF STUDENTS FOR THE MINISTRY. 293 

condition of man, Christ's infinite sacrifice to save him, and the everlasting 
import of the decisions of time. And here is my greatest source of anxiety. 
I fear that this lack of interest in the supply of the ministry is due to the 
inroads of a subtle unbelief that substitutes formalism for religion, and 
dependence upon man for dependence upon God. God forbid that we 
should first lose our reverence for the ministry, as an office of God's appoint- 
ment, and then also lose the ministry itself, which we have thought a tiling 
of so small account ! 

It is our business to ring the alarm-bell and to sound out the trumpet- 
call. As pastors, we need to direct the attention of our churches to this 
great matter, and to give them no rest till they feel their duty and discharge 
it. As church members, we need to pray and work to diffuse a new senti- 
ment throughout our whole Baptist body. As Baptists, who claim to believe 
the whole word of God, we need to set ourselves to turn the tide and create 
an enthusiasm for the ministry among our young men. And as a Conven- 
tion of Baptist Churches, met to consider the signs of the times and the 
needs of the cause, what could we better do than to pass with solemn unani- 
mity the recommendation of this Report, that all Baptist pastors through- 
out this State be urged to preach upon this subject to their people, and that 
all Baptist churches throughout the State be invited to set apart the Thurs- 
day of the Week of Prayer for special intercession to God, that he will stir 
up the minds of the best young men of our churches to give themselves to 
the gospel ministry. A year ago our brethren of the German Baptist 
churches took this same action for themselves, and this fall we saw the 
result in the quadrupling of the number of our new German students at 
Rochester. My brethren, we have sinned; we have disobeyed Christ's 
command. We are suffering, and must yet suffer, under his discipline. 
But we trust that it has not been wilful disobedience, but a sin of forget- 
fulness and infirmity. There is pardon for us, and the turning of our cap- 
tivity, when we repent and pray. May God give us the mighty Spirit of 
grace and supplication, that as one man the churches of this State, and 
every member of them, may "pray the Lord of the harvest, that he will 
send laborers into his harvest." 



XXVI. 

EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: ITS PRINCIPLES 
AKD ITS NECESSITY.* 



Brethren of the Monroe Association : — I thank you for this invitation to 
address you. I take it as a welcome home, to one who has boon long away. 
Among you I was born, and not very far from here was the place of my 
spiritual birth also. It seems fit that I should come back at last, and do what 
I can to repay the debt I owe. I am sure that in doing the work of theo- 
logical education among you, I am serving you. The history of this Asso- 
ciation, and its growth in intelligence and spiritual power, bear witness to 
the value of trained men in the ministry. But the very blessing of God upon 
the work already doue only urges us forward to larger work in the future. 
I do not know how you may feel here, but in my Ohio pastorate I was con- 
stantly oppressed with the spectacle of the destitute fields about me, and the 
scarcity of men who were able and willing to fill them. With the great 
growth of the couutry, and the diminished inclination of young men among 
us to resign the hope of business advancement for the prospect of a long 
course of study for the ministry, it seems to me a time when every church 
and every Christian needs most seriously to ponder this great need of labor- 
ers to fill the places of those who are passing away, and to occupy the vast 
fields now opening on every side of us. We have been told to pray that God 
will raise up ministers. We must remember that we cannot truly pray, with- 
out at the same time seeking out and educating men for the ministry of the 
gospel. We shall do this, just in proportion as we appreciate the funda- 
mental principles upon which this duty rests. These principles may be 
stated in some such way as this: First, God has appointed the ministry as 
a chief and indispensable agency for the perfecting of his church and for the 
conversion of the world. Secondly, the ministry, to be most efficient and 
successful, must be specially trained for its work. Thirdly, it is the duty 
of the churches to seek out men of natural fitness, lay upon them the duty 
of preaching, and when they are moved to give themselves to the work, 
furnish them with all needful means of preparation for their calling. 

About the first point, not one of us has a doubt. We believe in the divine 
appointment of the ministry — the setting apart of a class of men for the 
specific work of perfecting the church and propagating the gospel. All 
Christians indeed are responsible to Christ for a similar work. But Christ's 
ministers are to be leaders of the rest. No other agency can take the place 
of theirs. No power of civilization or of the press or of the sword can ever 



• An address delivered at the annual meeting of the Monroe Baptist Asso- 
ciation, West Henrietta, October 2, 1S72. 

294 



EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 293 

accomplish those moral wonders which are brought about, when a man 
clothed with God's power stands up and pleads with beating heart and liv- 
ing voice that men will be reconciled to God. In the great political contest 
which now agitates the nation, neither party dare content itself with news- 
paper articles and private influence alone. Men must be gathered in masses, 
and confronted with other men who sway them by personal magnetism as 
well as by argument. And so the influence of the pulpit will endure so loug 
as the world endures. There is provision and demand for it in the consti- 
tution of the human mind. Just as physicians exist because man has a 
physical nature, and lawyers exist because man has civil relation, so minis- 
ters of religion exist because there is such a thing as a social and religious 
nature in man. 

Consider the second point, then. The ministry, to be most efficient and 
successful, must be specially educated for its work. I might speak to you 
of the general advantages of education. I might tell you of the demand for 
trained men in all the arts. Only the other day one of the most successful 
manufacturers in Philadelphia said that it had been found, among manufac- 
turing engineers, that establishments and firms that employed educated men 
for managers, succeeded, while those which employed men not educated, did 
not. I might tell you of the rising sentiment all through the land which 
demands that all who enter responsible positions in our diplomatic and civil 
as well as our military service shall be men specially educated and qualified 
for their work. Now if this principle holds in the management of locomotive- 
shops, and in the military and civil service of the nation, must it not hold 
much more in the church, that great arsenal of spiritual powers? If we 
require the men who doctor our bodies to pass through special courses of 
study before entering upon their work, shall we not require it of physicians 
of the soul? If we provide normal schools for those who teach our children 
the rudiments of earthly knowledge, shall we not give equal facilities of 
preparation to those who are to instruct us out of the word of God? 

Just here we touch the vital point. Ministers of the gospel are ordained 
for the special work of instructing and influencing mind. The priests of 
the old dispensation were set for a different work. They were the servants 
of an external system of rites and forms. Paul most sharply describes the 
leading characteristics of the two, by calling the priests of the Mosaic econ- 
omy "'they that minister at the altar," while he styles the ministers of the 
New Testament ''they that preach the gospel." The Old Testament priests 
were representatives of the worshiper and, as it were, performed his service 
for him. The New Testament minister never supersedes his brethren, but 
only teaches them to perform true service for themselves. The New Testa- 
ment minister, I say, is set to instruct and influence mind. But by what 
means? By bringing to bear upon that mind the truth of God. The office of 
the ministry is to enlarge men's views of truth and deepen their love for it, 
and then, with this solid basis of intelligent conviction, to organize and devel- 
ope their practical activities in serving the Master and converting the world. 
And, therefore, having a work to do which is not mechanical or simply 
emotional in its nature, but which consists in bringing truth to bear upon 
men's minds and conduct, it is evident that the ministers of the gospel must 
be men who not only know the truth, but who know how to wield the truth 



29G EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: 

so as to convince others. To know this truth of God as God has written it, 
know it in its connections and relations, know it in the grandeur of its sys- 
tem and unity, know it in its wonderful adaptation to all the wants of the 
human soul — this requires not only the highest natural powers, but the 
best training of those powers which both man and God can give. 

But the day has gone by for this general argument. We all understand 
it. None of us are in danger of supposing that Paul did not need his early 
training in the schools, because Christ appeared to him near Damascus ; or 
that the apostles did not need their three years' theological course under the 
Savior's teaching, because they were to receive the Holy Ghost afterwards ; 
or that God's call obviates the necessity of study and preparation on the 
part of his preachers now. Let us take all that for granted, and let mo give 
you some special reasons in the nature of our times, why a higher education 
is demanded in our ministry than has ever been given before. One reason 
may be found in the advancing intelligence of the age. The newspaper and 
the common school have revolutionized society. The young of this genera- 
tion participate in a general culture which has been unknown to the masses 
in any age before. Our children know more of general literature and of 
political science at the age of ten, than their great-grandfathers knew at the 
age of twenty. They are critical hearers now. If the ministry is to influence 
them, it must be abreast of them in intellectual progress. Nay, is it not 
true that, to master this youthful mind of the century, the ministry must be 
before it in point of mental attainment? The best economy for the farmer 
who thinks twenty dollars a year a large contribution for the support of his 
minister, is to make that twenty a hundred, and so secure a pastor who can 
have power over his children's minds. If he contents himself with the 
cheapest service he can get, he may think himself well off if his boy's way- 
wardness does not make every twenty dollars cost him in the end a thousand, 
besides the sorrow of his old age and the ruin of the child. And not simply 
for those who are to constitute the strength or weakness of the next genera- 
tion. For the present adult mass of our congregations, we need the best 
gifts and training that can be furnished. We hear much about the power 
of the old-fashioned ministry of a hundred years ago, and I thank God 
for all they wrought. But it is not less true that if they lived to-day, they 
would preach sermons of different model from those they preached then, 
■ — or even Jonathan Edwards would lose his hearers. May God give us all 
the fervor and self-sacrifice they showed, and above all, the power of the 
Spirit that rested upon them. But with all these, which we may have as 
well as they, let us seek to know the truest and most effective method of 
reaching the modern mind, for we have to deal not with the eighteenth but 
the nineteenth century, — and we are to bring out of the treasures of God 
things new as well as old. God calls upon us to lead this advanced intelli- 
gence of the age with a still more advanced intelligence in the ministry of 
the church of Christ. 

A second reason in our times for the most advanced culture in the minis- 
try may be found in the skeptical tendencies of the day. "This is an age 
of unsolved problems," a modern German writer says most truly. The 
world asks religious teachers for the solution of them. There never was a 
day when the higher forms of speculative doubt had influence over so wide 



ITS PRINCIPLES AND ITS NECESSITY. 297 

a range of Bdnd. As the world has come up in intelligence, it has come ont 
from sensual opposition to intellectual opposition to Christianity. Brutal 
skepticism like that of Tom Paine and Voltaire has had its day. We live in 
an age when the name of religion is used to conjure with, and all the devil's 
most specious lies are labelled "Christianity." It is an age of scientific 
marvels, and of arguments against all real Christianity, drawn from science. 
But this science of the day is mostly the science of matter and of the things 
of matter. A subtle doubt whether there be any science of mind, whether 
there be any such thing as spirit, pervades a large part of our literature. It 
lurks in the most cultivated minds of our congregations, and often operates 
as an antidote to our most pointed arguments. A thousand forms of heart- 
unbelief entrench themselves in false theories and false philosophies, and 
could not long maintain themselves without these defenses. How plain it 
is that the preacher of the day should be prepared to treat such unbelief 
intelligently, unmask the fallacies of its reasoning, and then set the mind 
upon the sure foundation of truth. Or if, as is often the case, errors of 
those we address rest upon some false historical foundation, there is great 
need of such knowledge of doctrines and practices in their past development 
as will enable the preacher to show from what small deviations in principle 
the most enormous and soul-destroying errors have grown. Forewarned, 
forearmed, says the old proverb. Let our rising ministry have the means 
of knowing beforehand the nature of the opposition which they have to 
encounter in their work. 

Then there is a demand for special discipline of mind in the preacher, 
arising from "the intensity of modern life. We live faster than any age 
before us. Railroads and telegraphs have compressed into days the work 
of years. We do not live as long as Methusaleh did, but we live just as 
much. We have learned to think quickly and act quickly. There is a won- 
derful rush and excitement about modern trade and modern amusements. 
Men come into our churches and prayer circles jaded, and yet excited, with 
the press of the day's or the week's business. If you would influence them 
at all, you must think faster than they — furnish an excitement that will 
supersede theirs — startle them into attention, rouse them to thought, press 
them to immediate action, lest they go out into the whirl, and the tide sweep 
them away again. They will not stand the sermons four hours long, that 
were preached in the days of the Puritans and the Long Parliament. What 
truth they take in must be pemmican and not broth, condensed and hot, 
or they will certainly loathe the light bread the pulpit gives them. We have 
models in Scripture of short sermons and short prayers in abundance, — I do 
not know that we have more than one instance of long preaching, and that 
seems to have killed one of the hearers. But, whether intended as models 
or not, these Scripture instances are the only examples to follow in our age. 
And to preach the truth to this generation, stirring with life as it is, de- 
mands a power of concentration and a discipline of mind in the minister, that 
can be gained only by diligent and protracted study. — And the necessity of 
all this is the greater, from the fact that the preacher of the gospel in these 
days must be several men in one. The old recluse life of the monastery is 
out of place now. He must be a public man, a citizen as well a a preacher, 
a man interested in the denomination and the church at large, as well as 



298 EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: 

devoted to his own parish. These demands he cannot well meet without a 
power of quick and vigorous analysis, a habit of systematic labor, a careful 
economy of time, a mind that can (.inn in a moment from talk to study, or 
from study to prayer. If this discipline has not been gained in early life, 
it is hard to secure it afterwards. The joints of the mind are most supple 
in youth, — men run most easily then into the mould of habit. To meet this 
intense age on its own ground, and turn its activities into holy channels, 
needs early preparation of both mind and heart. The best preachers feel 
their needs in this respect the most, and wonder that God can use such inapt 
material for any good. Let us see that the next generation of preachers 
enters on its work with better equipment than we possess. 

A better preparation is demanded again by the fact that this is an age of 
organization. The forces of evil are organized as never before. Every new 
enterprise of speculation or trade has its Society. So, too, it is an age of 
organized religious effort. Our churches in the great cities are seeing the 
necessity of a division of labor among their members, and of providing 
agencies for developing the various gifts of the church, and of encouraging 
and sustaining all manner of benevolent undertakings. It is beginning to be 
seen that a true pastor is more than a preacher, more than a visitor of his 
flock, more than a worker on individuals, — that he is not only to work him- 
self but to do a large part of his work through others, — in other words, that 
he is to combine and organize the talent of the church and to lead it out to 
new work and new conquests for Christ. If Alexander the Great should 
wake from his slumbers, he could not fight the battle of Sedan to-day with- 
out learning the art of war. And the pastor of a century ago, who should 
wake from sleep to-day in the midst of a working church in London or New 
York or Rochester, and should see the order and efficiency of Sabbath school 
and mission work, of church visitation, of poor relief societies, of tem- 
perance organizations, of committees on strangers, of street preaching 
enterprises, would not only think the millennium near at hand, but would 
ask to be taught this new art of war that he too might be successful. In 
this day when we are learning so much of the value of organization in 
Christ's work, how plain it is that we ought not to send out our young minis- 
ters without giving them the opportunity of observing and participating in 
these new plans and agencies for the extension of Christ's kingdom. I thank 
God that our Theological Seminary is planted in a large city, under the 
shadow of four large and vigorous churches, iu which our students in course 
of preparation for the ministry may see with their own eyes and hear with 
their own ears what Christ is doing in these modern days to develope and 
enlarge the activities of his church. I count the pastors of these churches 
as assistant professors in the seminary, and these churches as our great sup- 
port and strength. Let all our rising ministry have the opportunity of 
learning from them, and then go to their several charges over the land pre- 
pared to put over the doorways of their churches that inscription which one 
sees over the entrance to the Pacific Mills: "And to every man, his work." 

But after all, the great need of this age is the need of consecrated men, 
men filled with the Spirit of God. It is an age of advancing intelligence, of 
intense life, of skeplical tendencies, of organized effort of every kind, — but 
it is also an age of absorption in outward things. Meditation, introspection, 



ITS PRINCIPLES AND ITS NECESSITY. 299 

hardly exist. Nothing can make head against the cnrrent of wordliness but 
the fervor, the unction, the power, that come from God. I urge yon. 
therefore, brethren, to put your rising ministers under influences which will 
impress upon them the necessity of a hidden life with God and a profound 
communion with his truth. Paul did not rush at once Into the great labors 
of his life, — he spent three years in Arabia. And I believe that In the 
life of the Theological Seminary have been nurtured some of the noblest 
characters, have been born some of the noblest enterprises, that have ever 
adorned the annals of the church. It was while a student in Williams Col- 
lege, that Samuel J. Mills invited his college-mates Hall and Richards to a 
walk and led them to a retired spot in a meadow, where they spent all day 
in fasting and prayer, and in conversing on the duty of missions to the 
heathen. And so in the Theological Seminary it was, that Adoniram Judson 
and Samuel Newell came to the resolution of spending their lives in pagan 
lar.ds. and the result of that Seminary work was the formation of the Ameri- 
can Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In the three years of 
this Seminary life, and its warm-hearted communion with other students 
about the needs of the world and the power of Christ, our young men have 
an opportunity of spiritual growth and preparation, whose value is inesti- 
mable. And this Association can testify that, with the inward growth, there 
has often been outward work, in destitute regions about, that proved the 
value of the preparation, and gave promise of great future harvests to be 
reaped for God. 

And this brings me to the third and last thought of my subject, — namely, 
the obligation that rests upon the churches, not only to seek out and encour- 
age the men whom God has called to the work of the ministry, but to pro- 
vide the means needful- for their training and support until they shall be 
ready for their active work. I fear that in all these particulars we are sadly 
deficient. I fear that the old days when Christian men and women conse- 
crated their sons to the ministry of Christ from the cradle are almost gone 
by, and that we have fallen upon times when the calling of a preacher is 
thought rather beneath the aspirations of the cultivated and well-born. We 
need to have a revival of true sentiments in this matter, for depreciation of 
Christ's ambassadors is depreciation of Christ himself. When we consider 
whose ambassadors they are, and what business they transact between the 
King of kings and his subjects, what earthly dignity seems as high as theirs? 
Surely an office like this demands the choicest and noblest gifts. As Arch- 
bishop Leighton has said: "If bodily integrity was necessary to those who 
ministered of old at the altar, shall the mentally blind and lame be good 
enough for the ministration of that gospel that exceeds in glory? Let us 
not intimate Jeroboam, who made high places but made priests of the lowest 
of the people, who had abundance of golden cups but was content with 
wooden priests." If the minister of the gospel be, as George Herbert says, 
"the deputy of Christ for the reducing of men to the obedience of God." 
then no talents or graces can be too precious to be employed in this sacred 
service. Why is it then that we lack for men, — why do scores of most im- 
portant posts call for able ministers of Christ, and call in vain? Is it not 
because the churches at large have not felt the great necessity? And as 
church after church rises in culture to the point where the unanimous voice 



300 EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: 

is: "Let us have an educated minister, to educate our children and the com- 
munity," who can tell where the supplies will be for our failing ranks ten 
years from now, unless God grant us a new spirit of prayer and effort for 
the raising up of a competent ministry? If there ever was a time when we 
needed to ponder our Savior's command to pray for laborers, it is now. 

It has been said that the great error of Luther was that, while he restored 
New Testament doctrine, he did not restore the New Testament church ; that, 
while he cared for the faith, he did not care for the organization of believers 
upon the model left by Christ. I have another fault to find with Luther, 
which seems to me almost if not quite as serious, namely that he did not es- 
tablish Seminaries for the education of the ministry. Contending, like a giant, 
against the influence of Aristotle, that 'accursed mischief-making heathen" 
as he called him, he notwithstanding left the Universities under that same 
influence, and the Universities trained up men to undo all his work. See 
the result in Germany. When once the spiritual impulse of Luther's per- 
sonal presence had ceased, the enemy began to gather strength. Unin- 
structed piety did not stand against the assaults of rationalism. With the 
Universities training men of thought to do battle against the faith, and no 
distinctively Christian schools to train its defenders, the result was that, two 
centuries after, infidelity was to all intents and purposes the established 
religion of Germany, and half the fruits of the Reformation were swept 
away. Our German Baptists of the old country are in danger of repeating 
the same error. With much gained under the labors of Dr. Oncken, there is 
little or no provision for the leadership and instruction of the churches after 
Dr. Oncken has passed away. It is only just now that they are waking up to 
see that, without Seminaries for the training of ministers, all that has been 
gained is in peril, and that a few years may see the rushing tide of irreligion 
sweeping over them again. We cannot consolidate what we have gained in 
a new convert, without instruction and discipline. How much less can we 
consolidate the results of a great popular awakening over a whole country, 
without provision for the instruction and discipline of the formed and form- 
ing churches. Let us appreciate our own position as a denomination, 
brethren ! Under the good Providence of God, we have come up from 
weakness to be the second denomination, in point of numbers, in the land. 
We have secured the ear of the world. Every step in the progress of Bibli- 
cal scholarship has been a step forward for us. With our very denomina- 
tional existence based upon knowledge of the original languages of the Bible 
and a correct interpretation of it, we stand or fall with the education of our 
ministry. And now the question rises before us, solemn and momentous as 
no other can be, shall we fix and consolidate what we have gained, or shall 
we allow it all, through ignorance and neglect, to be swept away? I know 
your answer, brethren. You say, let us set ourselves to this great work 
until every village and town and hamlet throughout the land shall be pro- 
vided with a teacher and pastor who shall expound the word of God, — and, 
in accordance with the model there laid down, shall build up the beautiful 
structure of a New Testament church — a church of baptized believers. 

And what are the means? Our Theological Seminaries come first and 
foremost. What have they not done for us? Dr. Hackett, our venerated 
professor, was telling me only the other day of the time when he and a few 



ITS PRINCIPLES AND ITS NECESSITY. 301 

other students were counting up the number of educated Baptist ministers 
in the neighborhood of Boston, and they could find but three, — now at 
every Anniversary of Newton Theological Institution, they come up by scores 
and even hundreds. Seminaries like Newton and Rochester have already 
trained the very best pastors and preachers we have — the very strength of 
our denomination to-day. It is our duty to see that the Theological Semi- 
nary nearest to us, and upon which we most naturally depend, shall never 
want for buildings, library, teachers, — never want for facilities of every 
sort for the work it has to do. Is there one within the sound of my 
voice who has been blessed by God with abundant financial prosperity? 
Let me beg such an one to consider the power for good of a blow struck at 
the right time. Who can tell the ultimate good accomplished by that single 
man Crozer, in the establishment of the Seminary for theological education 
near Philadelphia? Untold ages will rise up to call him blessed, and the 
fruits of his benefactions will go on ripening and gathering until the great 
harvest-day of the world ! May God raise up many such men to bless the 
church and the world ! We may not be able to give as largely, but we may 
all do our part, if we only have the like spirit. There are many even now 
pressing their way bravely through a Seminary course, though it costs them 
sacrifice and hardship. We must not let such men waste years of strength 
in manual toil, before they come to us, in order to make money enough to 
pay their way through the Seminary. We must not let them want for books 
and clothes after they have come. We must take them into our sympathies 
and prayers, and furnish them with all that is needed to make their course 
of study profitable and successful. And this cannot be done for a large 
number of students, without large outlay and expenditure. But to this 
all of us may contribute, and in doing it may feel that we give directly 
to Christ and the work of his gospel. We may all at least assist in the work 
of the New York Baptist Union for Ministerial Education, and thereby help 
on to a place in the ministry some useful man who, when we are dead, may 
be proclaiming the everlasting gospel. Take this Society into your hearts 
then, my brethren. Give liberally into its treasury. Send to it the men 
whom God has called, and whom it should educate. And ''may he that 
ministereth seed to the sower, both minister bread for your food, and mul- 
tiply your seed sown, and increase the fruits of your righteousness, being 
enriched in everything to all bountifulness, which causeth through us 
thanksgiving to God." 



XXVII. 

EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY : ITS IDEA AND ITS 
REQUISITES/ 



We are assembled this afternoon to dedicate this edifice to God and to 
the .cause of ministerial education. The enlightened liberality of a friend 
who honors us with his presence on this occasion, and whose name the 
building will bear through coming years, puts the completed structure in 
our possession, to be used henceforth, so long as the timber and the stones 
shall hold together, for the one purpose of providing a proper training for 
those who are to be the preachers of the gospel of Christ. It is matter of 
profound satisfaction to know that this gift, so munificent and free, has been 
made in prayer, as an offering not to men but to Jesus our Lord. May the 
Spirit of Jesus abundantly rest upon the giver, and make his gift to us a 
source of the best gifts to him ! And may the Spirit of Jesus also rest upon 
us, that we may be made worthy of the gift, and be properly qualified to 
use it for the honor of Christ and for the advancement of sacred learning ! 

We rejoice to-day, because we see in this dedication a sign of progress. 
The members of this Board of Trustees, who have so many times during the 
last thirty years assumed so serious financial respousibilities, rejoice that 
God has raised up able friends for the Seminary. And if those early pro- 
jectors and helpers of this enterprise who were called to their reward before 
their eyes could see the fulfillment of their hopes — if those early friends 
who founded the institution in tears and prayers, can look down upon this 
scene, 1 am sure that they rejoice with us — the sowers with the reapers. 
God has heard and answered prayer on behalf of his cause; he has estab- 
lished the work of our hands ; to him alone be praise ! 

The Germans have a beautiful word derived from the traveler's custom of 
getting his bearings before he starts anew upon his journey. They say that 
he "orients himself" — turns to the east with its sun and light, that he may 
know how to direct his path. It seems well for us who have the interest of 
the Rochester Theological Seminary at heart, to orient ourselves. The 
dedication of this building cannot be accompanied by anything more fitly 
than by a careful inquiry into the purpose which the building is to subserve. 
I propose to you, therefore, as the subject of this address : The True Idea 
of Theological Education, and the Requisites to its Realization. In other 
words, what ought to be our aim in such a Seminary as this, and .what are 
the means needful to secure it? 

The training of the ministry, — It is a short phrase, but to unfold its mean- 



* An Address delivered at the Dedication of Rockefeller Hall, Rochester 
Theological Seminary, May 19, 1880. 

302 



EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 



303 



ing will require thought and care. It implies conviction on our part that 
there is a set of men specially called by Christ, the ascended Savior and 
Head of the church, to be the proclaimers of his salvation and the spiritual 
teachers of his people. It implies conviction that the work of preaching 
Christ and the wide range of his truth as it is made known in the Scriptures 
demands an intellectual and religious preparation beyond that of any mere 
human calling. It implies that the duty of training their preachers is just 
as imperative upon the churches as the duty of training their converts — the 
work of the Holy Spirit not superseding the work of the church in the one 
case any more than in the other. It implies that the provision for this 
training, since it has to do with the infinite and eternal interests of men's 
sauls and of God's kingdom, should be the most ample and complete that 
our wisdom can devise and that is warranted by the means Providence has 
placed at our disposal. 

The only effective provision for such training is that of the Theological 
Seminary. Happily we do not need at this time and in this presence to 
reiterate the old arguments in favor of special Seminaries of theological 
instruction. Experience is teaching us anew every day that this mighty 
rushing age can be taken captive for Christ only by men abreast of its high- 
est culture and possessed of an intellectual energy equal to its own. Our 
greatest success in establishing efficient churches has been precisely in those 
quarters of the land where we have longest had an advanced training for 
our ministers. We have learned that college education alone will not fit a 
young man for the ministry any more than it will fit him for medicine or 
the law, — special study of his own profession is requisite in each of these 
separate callings, if we would secure the highest quality of service in those 
whom we employ. And we have given over expecting training for our young 
ministers, that meets the demands of the age, at the hands of settled pastors. 
They have not the time to give to special instruction of young men, — even 
when they have the minute acquaintance with the several branches of theo- 
logical knowledge which is needed in a competent teacher. It is a settled 
principle among us that this instruction can be secured for the vast majority 
of our young preachers only by the maintenance of institutions in which 
each department of sacred learning is represented by a teacher who makes 
it his lifelong work and specialty. 

What these departments should be is by no means an arbitrary matter. 
Both their number and their subjects are determined by the necessities of 
the case. For the theology in which we desire the rising ministry to be 
instructed is primarily a Biblical Theology, a theology rooted and grounded 
in Scripture, a theology which unfolds and applies the word of God as the 
material and the directory of preaching. First of all, then, the student must 
learn to read his Bible, for himself, as he can only do, by knowing the orig- 
inal languages in which that Bible was written, and by applying to it the 
principles of sound grammatical and exegetical interpretation. This study 
of the Bible naturally divides itself into work upon the Old Testament, and 
work upon the New. The Hebrew of the former, and the Greek of the lat- 
ter, must receive equal attention, as the vehicles of God's communications 
to men. Thus we see the necessity of the two departments of Hebrew and 
Greek. But to a well-furnished expounder of God's work is needed some- 



304 EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY : 

thing more than personal command of the instruments of investigation ; he 
must know how the Spirit of God has led the church of earlier days to inter- 
pret the Scriptures, and what the results of such interpretation have been 
upon the church's life. Thus we come to recognize the indispensableness 
of a third department, that namely of Historical Theology, with its two 
branches, the History of Doctrine, which gives account of the progressive 
apprehension by the church of the truth of Scripture and the shaping of 
that truth into doctrinal statements ; and Church History, which describes 
the resulting and accompanying changes in the life of the church itself. 

We must go still further. The thoughtful mind must systematize the 
results of Scripture study, must gather into a well proportioned and organic 
whole the scattered facts which the Bible gives him. In the light of past 
errors and with the help of past interpretations, he must build these mate- 
rials into a consistent scheme which he can defend against the reasonings of 
the skeptic and harmonize with the facts of nature and consciousness. 
Hence arises the need of a fourth department — Systematic Theology. Sys- 
tematic Theology is nothing more nor less than the study of Scripture truths 
in their connections, the recognition of their divine unity as the revelation 
of one God and Redeemer, the justification of them as consistent with every 
other portion of our knowledge. But lastly, there must be a fifth depart- 
ment of Practical Theology, in which this system of truth is considered as 
a means of renewing and sanctifying men. We do not study theology as 
mere abstract science, but solely with a view to its publication and enforce- 
ment. Not a single one of the departments I have previously mentioned, 
that does not daily make plain to the student its connections with preaching 
and life. But in a Seminary for the education of preachers, there needs to 
be a department that devotes itself exclusively to the side of practice. To 
this department belong Homiletics and Pastoral Theology, since these are 
but scientific presentations of the right methods of unfolding Christian 
truth and of bringing it to bear upon men, in public and in private. You 
can see at once that these five departments of Hebrew, Greek, History, 
Doctrine, Preaching, are all essential to the complete training of the minis- 
ter ; and that the range of thought and of literature in each is so great, that 
the mastery of any single one, so as properly to teach it, is enough to fur- 
nish the sole occupation of the most laborious and able instructor. 

It may be said that the students of the Seminary are but beginners ; that 
the training they need is training in the elements ; that those who give this 
elementary teaching do not need to be so far advanced beyond their pupils. 
A little consideration, however, will suffice to show how mistaken is this 
reasoning. The best elementary teaching can be given only by one who 
is a master of his subject; the highest art is required to simplify that which 
is recondite and profound. None but a thoroughly furnished and experi- 
enced teacher can meet the intellectual demands of classes of college gradu- 
ates, some of whom at least have inquisitive and penetrating minds. Nor 
would it be safe to entrust to instructors of minor ability the answering of 
the perplexing and critical questions with which the youthful student is beset 
at the first stage of his theological Inquiries. Not everything can be done 
in three years of study, but it is of infinite importance that what is done 
should be done aright. To form proper methods of Scripture interpreta 



ITS IDEA AND ITS REQUISITES. 305 

tion, to lay the foundation stones of Christian doctrine so that the super- 
structure shall be safe, to adopt right ideals of preaching and of pastoral 
work, — these things are all-important ; and the securing of these results 
demands the most thorough scholarship on the part of the teacher, com- 
bined with a strong personality and a power of imparting what he knows 
to others. 

Here we have Ave departments of instruction, the maintenance of which is 
essential to a liberal course of theological training. I have not spoken of 
other departments which might be added, and which some day will be added, 
for I confine myself to the immediate and the practical. Ever since this 
Seminary began, instruction in all these branches has been given. The 
only change has been in applying more and more fully the principle of divis- 
ion of labor. The Hebrew and the Greek, which in the early clays of the 
institution were taught by a single professor, now have each the separate 
services of a competent man, and in like manner Homiletics and Theology 
now constitute two departments, whereas they once constituted but one. 
The older graduates of the Seminary, as they return to their Alma Mater, 
can mark the increased range and thoroughness of work that have resulted 
from this change. The question with us now, is with regard to the proper 
support of these departments, and the accumulation of an endowment suffi- 
cient to put the work in each of them beyond the contingencies of failing 
interest and of financial reverses. Many times even in these later years we 
have asked ourselves whether it was our duty to cut down the salaries of 
professors to correspond with a revenue diminished by hard times and by 
decrease in the current rates of interest. But this has always seemed a false 
step to take. We want the best service that can be procured. We cannot 
obtain the men who will do the work required, for a sum less than average 
salaries of our city pastors. Nor can we expect to keep men, who are con- 
tinually offered more for their services in other positions. We should act 
with the same wisdom as that which great railroad corporations show, when 
they attract and keep their best employees by a fixed and sufficient compen- 
sation. Endowment funds should furnish to the teachers a support equal 
to that which they could command in other spheres of ministerial work. 
The grinding economy which is compelled to abridge the education of the 
family and to relinquish every luxury, is not the best condition for success- 
ful teaching. Perpetual anxiety about matters of finance, in the Seminary 
or in the household, is not consistent with a complete devotion to the work 
of acquiring and imparting knowledge. The health and mental vigor of the 
ordinary pastor require reinforcement by occasional recreation and rest. It 
is not different with the average professor. But recreation and rest involve 
expense. It is a mistaken economy to render these impossible, through the 
insufficiency of his compensation. I am not now speaking of what is, nor 
of what must be, but simply of what should be, in a fully equipped educa- 
tional institution. Much valuable work has been done by small and strug- 
gling seminaries of learning ; but, as culture and wealth increase, it is found 
by other bodies of Christians, and it will be found by us, that the best secur- 
ity for faithful work on the part of the instructor is a pecuniary support 
sufficient to relieve him from distracting cares, and to permit his exclusive 
attention to the task he has been set to do, 
20 



306 EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: 

What I have said with regard to the thoroughness of teaching requisite La 
such an institution as this, implies that back of the actual instruction there 
should be solidity of learning. The Seminary must be a store-house, as well 
as an apparatus for distribution ; a reservoir, as well as a net-work of canals. 
It is an institution of learning in the broadest sense. It is not only to give 
out instruction in the present, but it is to preserve the knowledge of the 
past, and to add to its stock. For this purpose, it needs to be provided 
with the instruments of investigation. It needs a library, in which arc 
gathered the treasures of past thought with regard to the word of God and 
the history of the church. Whatever investigations may be conducted into 
the meaning of Scripture or the bearing upon it of ethnological or linguistic 
science, should find the needful books at hand to render them successful. 
Students of varying tastes should find, each for himself, the volumes adapt- 
ed to stimulate their thought and to prompt original inquiries. Missionary 
biographies should draw out the missionary spirit. Devotional reading 
should be furnished in the prayers and experiences of holy men in all the 
ages past. And to make this array of literature accessible, there* should be 
a librarian who can be at the service of the student through all the working 
hours of the day. Add to the Library, a Museum of Geography and Archae- 
ology, that will furnish, in object-lessons, all proper aids to the understand- 
ing of the Holy Land, its customs and its configuration. Add to these a 
Lectureship, which shall each j-ear bring the student in contact with dis- 
tinguished preachers and scientists, in brief courses of lectures upon the 
subjects to which they have given special attention. Only with a liberal 
supply of these various helps, literary, topographical and personal, can the 
teacher do his best work of instruction, or be himself most thoroughly 
master of the department to which he has devoted himself. 

These teachers and helps being provided, the Seminary is ready for its 
work of instruction. The method of that instruction is of more importance 
than the helps or the men. We point with satisfaction to the past history 
of Rochester, and to the men who have gone out from this Seminary, as a 
•full justification of what we deem the peculiarities of the institution. The 
aim has been, from its beginning, to teach the student to think for himself. 
We would not permit him to be the mere passive recipient of other men's 
learning; we would not have him the lifeless repeater of a second-hand 
orthodoxy. The true aim of theological instruction should be to cultivate 
the habit of theological thought, to enable the pupil to grasp with his own 
mind, in his own way, the fundamental truths of Scripture, and to acquire the 
power of analyzing, arranging and presenting the results of his own think- 
ing, for the quickening and instruction of others. Instead of cramming 
down the student's throat a ready-made scheme of doctrine, he is to make 
every point a battle-ground, and win his way to assured faith, through con- 
quest of fairly recognized difficulties. Discussion, instead of being a mere 
by-play, is an indispensable requisite to right theological training — discus- 
sion that sharpens the wits, separates the wheat of substantial truth from 
the chaff of mere phrases, questions mere forms of human devising that it 
may build its faith on the simple deliverances of God's word. A theolog- 
ical "Seminary," where open question and answer is a forbidden thing 
in the lecture-room, is almost a contradiction in terms. All our traditions 



ITS IDEA AND ITS aEQUISITES. 307 

favor, -nay demand, uulimited liberty of inquiry. Not to repeat by rote 
certain stereotyped expressions do we send out our graduates, but to speak 
out each bis own convictions of truth, arrived at by personal study of 
Scripture, and made vivid by bis personal experience. 

To accomplish this result requires a happy combination of circumstances. 
Physical, social, and religious influences all need to be brought to bear upon 
the growing mind and heart of the student. Among the physical influences, 
in addition to properly warmed and ventilated rooms for study and for 
class-exercises, such as we have secured in this building, may be counted 
that of a well-appointed Gymnasium. A sound body is the condition of 
a healthy mind. The best of intellectual work can be done only when the 
physical system is in a state of vigor, and this can be maintained only by 
daily exercise. If our climate were more propitious, we might trust to out- 
of-door walks to provide this. But so large a portion of our Seminary year 
is wet and forbidding, that opportunity for in-door exercise such as gym- 
nastic apparatus would afford, is eminently desirable. There is moreover 
an element of recreation in this form of physical training, when pursued by 
young men in companies, which adds very greatly to its effectiveness. The 
Gymnasium should have attached to it rooms for bathing, that cleanliness 
and exercise may go together. The palaestra of the Greeks united these 
two, and the period of the highest physical development was also the period 
of the noblest ancient art and civilization. 

Among these physical conditions, I should be inclined to lay special 
emphasis upon the training of the vocal organs, if it were not that this dis- 
cipline of the voice is also a discipline of expression, and so involves a 
higher intellectual element. A generous friend of the Seminary has enabled 
us to make an excellent beginning in elocutionary instruction. There can 
be no doubt that this should constitute a part of Seminary teaching from 
the commencement to the end of the course : for a clear articulation, a pure 
tone, a manly address, are absolute essentials to success in pulpit oratory. 
But I pass to consider a final but most important question respecting the 
physical and material side of seminary life, namely, the question of support. 
How shall the majority of students find the means to prosecute their work? 
I say the majority, for the fact stares us in the face, that bnt a very small 
minority of theological students are blessed, by inheritance, with this world's 
goods. Since the days of the apostles, God has called the poor rather than 
the rich to be his ministers. The most of Seminary students come from 
small churches in the country towns — churches that have hard struggle to 
maintain their own existence, and are quite uuable to support these foster- 
children of theirs through the long ten years of preparatory, collegiate and 
theological education. There are but two resources. These young men 
must support themselves or they must receive aid. They cannot support 
themselves, without greatly prolonging their course of study and depriving 
the churches of some of their best years of service. With the increasing 
demands of our Seminary curriculum, requiring as it does for its successful 
prosecution the whole time and all the strength of the ablest men, it becomes 
a serious and even dangerous strain upon the constitution of the student, to 
add to this regular work of the course the work of providing for his own 
support. Many and many a valuable man has been broken for life by 



30.s EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: 

attempting to carry through his studies independently of foreign aid. The 
whole system of beneficiary help proceeds upon the principle that It is a 
saving to the churches to economize the time and the strength of its young 
ministers. They have given up all hope of worldly gain in order to devote 
their lives to the service of the churches, — it is only reasonable that the 
churches should enable them to make their preparation for this service as 
brief and as thorough as possible. 

The chief difficulty connected with the subject is that of determining the 
form and the extent to which this aid shall be given. There has been a 
feeling, on the part of some, that the reception of such aid by the student 
tended to destroy his manliness and independence. I conceive that this 
impression ignores the real relation between the parties. Whatever funds 
are contributed for this purpose are given to Christ's cause, and with a view 
to the benefit of the churches. They are distributed to students for the 
ministry, not as a personal gratuity, but as a means of fitting them more 
quickly for their work of serving Christ. What is given for Christ's sake, 
they may take for Christ's sake. It is money belonging to their Lord, and 
bestowed by him. There is no more discredit or humiliation in taking 
what pecuniary aid he gives, than in taking the spiritual aid he gives from 
day to day. It is duty to take it, rather than to narrow and ahriilgo the 
work of preparation, by devoting any considerable part of the time for 
study, to work for personal maintenance. No young man feels his manli- 
ness or his honor compromised by receiving from his father the means of 
education. There is no more dishonor in receiving the means of education 
from the churches. 

I am aware that there are occasional instances of unworthy men who mis- 
use their opportunities and seek aid from interested motives. I am per- 
suaded that the number of such is very small. The fact that any such exist 
should render us careful in selecting the objects of our beneficiary appro- 
priations, but. should not lead us to doubt the principle upon which we act. 
The great majority of theological students, although not free from faults of 
character, are yet true men, desirous of living for God's glory, and for men's 
salvation. I believe that there is quite as much danger of harming them by 
ungenerous treatment, as by over-liberality. The utmost appropriation 
made to any one student by the Ministerial Union for the last few years has 
been $130 per year. The expenses of a Seminary course must be $200 per 
year, even with the extremest economy. The idea that on this $130 a stu- 
dent can live in luxury, is a very mistaken one. My own conviction is that 
it is all too meagre, and that $150, instead of $130, should henceforth be the 
limit of aid. If out of this small sum, supplemented by his vacation-work, 
the student can save a little for the purchase of books, so much the better. 
Let the gathering of the foundation for a library be the reward of economy 
and industry. Money could hardly be put to better use than in purchasing 
a few of the best books to serve as tools in his opening ministry. 

I am convinced moreover that this appropriation of $150 per year should 
be made as an out and out gift, and not in the way of a loan. To lay upon 
a young man at his entrance into his work the burden of a heavy debt, is* to 
handicap him in the race. In the case of a sensitive spirit, it is to cow and 
discourage him from the very outset. In a small parish, with many neces- 



ITS IDEA AND ITS REQUISITES. 309 

sary expenses at the first, and with salary only sufficient for the barest 
maintenance, the payment of such a debt for one's education involves the 
struggle and anxiety of years. Such a debt renders it impossible for many 
a young man to enter honorably upon the service of a small and feeble 
church, and stifles his impulses to missionary self-sacrifice. His first duty 
seems to be to clear off his incumbrances. So the churches suffer, as well 
as he. Rather than incur a debt, which he foresees will thus hamper him 
and forbid a whole hearted service in the ministry, many a noble man re- 
fuses to accept aid at all ; attempts to maintain himself during his Seminary 
course by preaching or by secular work ; by consequence lowers his stand- 
ard both of preaching and of study; or if he succeeds in accomplishing 
both, as only one man in ten can do, injures himself in health, and so 
imposes a mortgage of another sort upon his whole future. In view of these 
considerations, it is my earnest desire that the Board of this Seminary may 
see the way clear to a total abolition of the loan-system so far as it applies 
to beneficiary aid. I would even cancel all notes heretofore given in return 
for such aid, and take such notes in future only in cases where the student 
prefers the loan, rather than the gift. Our loan-system was devised only 
as a temporary expedient to bridge over the time of annually recurring 
deficits, and to bring back into the treasury for future use the money that 
was once paid out. But may we not believe that, as Providence has raised 
up in the past those who could appreciate our needs, so in the future there 
will be found those who will be glad to provide a Scholarship Fund, the 
income of which shall meet this regular and fundamental need of support 
on the part of our students, at least so far as it is not provided for by the 
annual contributions of the churches? 

It may be expected, in this connection, that I will give at least some notion 
of the safeguards which I would throw around this giving of beneficiary 
aid, so that it shall not be bestowed upon unworthy persons. I admit that 
not every young man who proposes to enter a Theological Seminary is a fit 
object of these gifts of the churches. But there are two tests which take no 
long time to apply, and which are well-nigh decisive. The first is that of 
intellectual activity, as shown by the student's mastery of the regular les- 
sons of the course; apd the second is that of moral activity, or the prose- 
cution of some regular Christian work during his Seminary studies. It is 
remarkable how the lack of moral earnestness reacts upon the scholastic 
earnestness of the student, and how a whole-hearted piety shows itself in 
faithfulness to the daily duties of the study and the class-room. For this 
reason I would have the curriculum a rigorous one — so rigorous that noth- 
ing but industry and self-denying devotion to study can enable the pupil 
successfully to accomplish its requirements. I would set the standard so 
high that neither an indolent nor an incompetent man should be able to 
complete the course, and this intellectual test I would apply without fear 
or favor. We want not so much numbers, as quality, in the ministry — men 
disciplined, alert, energetic ; and the Theological Seminary is the very place 
where these qualities shall be encouraged aud trained. It is not so easy to 
see into the heart and discern the motive, but you can look into the exami- 
nation-papers and discern whether hard work has been done, and in the vast 
majority of cases that hard work will be the evidence of an honest mind and 



810 EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: 

a determination to do service to God. I would not only make the reception 
of beneficiary aid dependent absolutely upon the attainment of a high 
scholastic standard — this we have already done — but I would go a step 
:'urther, and, within certain limits, graduate the amount of such aid to the 
thoroughness of the student's work. 

I have alluded to the social conditions requisite to the full success of 
Seminary work. For the development of the student's mind and heart, for 
the cultivation of his powers of thought and feeling, the relation between 
professor and pupil needs to be a peculiar one. For the safe management 
of such an institution, there must of course be such a thing as government ; 
and that government is not intrusted to the hands of the students, but to 
the Faculty and to the Board. There must never be the slightest doubt 
that there are rules and regulations to be submitted to, by every student, 
and that such submission is an indispensable condition of continued mem- 
bership in the institution. But, to use Napoleon's phrase, the hand of iron 
may be incased in a glove of velvet. There may be little show of authority, 
— little show of authority is necessary where the student recognizes himself 
as responsible for the maintenance of order, and is in the true sense a law 
unto himself. While, however, I urge steadfastly the recognition of the 
powers that be, in Seminary as well as in civil government, I desire to bring 
out very distinctly the complementary truth that the relation between pro- 
fessor and pupil here is not simply that which is common in the High 
School or the College, but is a higher, closer, more familiar relation. The 
students of the Seminary are grown men ; they are commonly mature in 
mind ; some of them have had experience in life ; they have often been 
teachers themselves ; they are all Christian men, or are so regarded ; they 
have professedly devoted themselves without reserve to the service of 
Christ. To such as these the Professor must hold the relation not simply 
of the instructor to his pupils, or of the gentleman to those whom he meets 
in the common intercourse of life. There must mingle with it something of 
the paternal and the pastoral element. Mutual affection will admit a dis- 
creet familiarity. The teacher will believe all things of the pupil; take for 
granted his good purpose ; be open and accessible and serviceable ; aim to 
carry with him the moral sentiment of his classes ; rule not by compulsion 
but by love. 

I would make this Seminary an institution where every day's exercises 
should be a series of examples in Pastoral Theology; where the student 
should learn how to rule his church, by the methods by which his teachers 
rule him. I do not mean that the analogy is complete. There is a govern- 
ment here that goes beyond the consent of the governed ; there may be now 
and then an ill-conditioned mind that is not impressed by the consideration 
with which it is treated, and that mistakes Christian courtesy for weakness. 
Such a man must be gratified by an exhibition of force ; but it need not be 
the thunderbolt, — there are quiet forces equally effective; it may be inti- 
mated to him that the evidence of his call to the ministry Is not judged to 
be sufficient to warrant the continuance of his studies. At all costs it must 
be understood that there are "powers that be," and that these powers are 
"ordained of God." But still I insist that this disciplinary aspect of Semi- 
nary government should seldom be visible. Into all the relations of Faculty 



ITS IDEA AND ITS REQUISITES. 311 

and students the social element should enter. There should be an intimacy 
of acquaintance, a readiness on the one hand to ask, and on the other hand 
to give, counsel and help, that is unknown in lower and secular schools. 
There are other types of influence — the purely and severely intellectual, 
the mandatory and arrogant — but they do not belong to an institution for 
the training of pastors, where the inner impulse to all duty is the spirit of 
Christ. I would make this institution a training-school in Christian love, 
for it Is this alone that can make the work of the ministry successful. 

Such a spirit as this can be maintained only by constant efforts and expe- 
dients, on the part of professors and students alike. The Professor's house 
and study should be not unknown to the student. There is a social culture 
and tact which is of the greatest value to the pastor, and for lack of which 
many able men fail to retain their influence over their churches. The stu- 
dent who comes from obscure surroundings has often had but the smallest 
opportunity to acquire this proper knowledge of the world. Anything that 
will make it easier for professors to invite students to their homes, and to 
introduce them to their families, will be of inestimable benefit. For the 
average student, away from his own home, and associating constautly with 
men like himself, there are temptations to a disregard of the conventional 
proprieties, which will be greatly lessened by insight into pleasant house- 
hold life from time to time through his course of study. The monotony of 
an unvarying routine will be informed with a new life and spirit by reason 
of the change. There is much that the Christian men and women of our 
city churches may do, in this way, for our coming ministry. But the chief 
responsibility, so far as it is a responsibility at all, must rest upon the mem- 
bers of the Faculty. Their power aud opportunity are limited, — but these 
might be greatly increased, if the provision of Professor's houses could bring 
them close together, and thus enable them easily to combine their efforts. 
The glimpses of home-life and of pleasant society thus rendered possible, 
would repay a large expenditure, by furnishing a needed preparation for the 
sudden entrance into social relations with his church, which so often forms 
the ordeal of the young minister. 

This leads me to say that the proper place for the Theological Seminary 
is the large city, for there these influences of association are most varied and 
strong. Mr. Herbert Spencer, among his many half-truths and perversions 
of the truth, has suggested one thought which none will be disposed to deny, 
namely, that other things being equal, the rapidity aud degree of intellectual 
progress is proportioned to the variety of environment. It is indeed the old 
truth in new dress — Experience is the best teacher. The young man who 
is thrust into a variety of positions, and is compelled to adapt himself to 
them as they come, will have a command of his resources and an education 
of his powers, such as cannot belong to the mere novice. For this reason 
the Theological Seminary ought to be where the currents of life are strong, 
and where much can be seen of things and of men. The country village will 
do for the Academy, but the College belongs to the town, and the Theologi- 
cal Seminary to the city. Let the boy be secluded, while his habits and 
principles are still forming; but, when he has got his growth, let him see 
something of the world in which he is to live and struggle. The knowledge 
he thus acquires will prepare him for the conflicts that are before him in the 



312 EDUCATION FOR THE MINISTRY: 

future. Particularly is it desirable that the young man who is to be a leader 
of Christ's people should, by personal acquaintance with well-organized 
and thoroughly aggressive churches, and by personal observation of excel- 
lent examples of preaching, be stimulated to emulate their virtues in the 
instruction and pastoral care of his own flock. I count this knowledge of 
Christian life in a large city as one of the social influences which most tend 
to broaden the mind and heart of the young preacher. 

This room, with its church-like appointments, witnesses that there is a 
yet deeper need in Seminary life than the social one which I have mentioned. 
It is well to provide the means of intercourse with society — but it is beyond 
all account more essential to provide means of Intercourse with God. In 
the secluded life of the Seminary there will always be temptations to an 
abstract intellectualism. They need to be counteracted continually by devo- 
tion and by religious work. Mrs. Stowe once remarked that the theological 
students that she had seen were the most irreverent of men. It was, I think, 
the misjudgment of an acute observer, inferring more than was just, from 
the freedom of students' disputations with each other. Yet here is a danger, 
against which we need continually to guard. Familiarity with even sacred 
things, unqualified by the spirit of prayer and of Christian effort for others. 
tends ever to contempt. And therefore I would regard prayer as a regular 
part of Seminary work. As the apostles gave themselves to prayer and to 
the ministry of the word, so the theological student should give himself to 
prayer and to the study of the word. Indeed, Luther's old maxim is true : 
"Bene orasse est bene studuisse," — true praying is true studying. Cole- 
ridge could call prayer the intensest exercise of the human understanding, 
and it is certain that, without it, there can be no valuable exercise of the 
human understanding upon any theme with which the preacher or pastor 
has to deal. 

I count the meeting for prayer in which professors and students gather 
on a common level at noon of every day, and the regular service with which 
the exercises of every afternoon are closed, as an essential part of our Semi- 
nary training. Here the student may learn that his teachers are something 
more than teachers, — that they have hearts throbbing with the same emotion 
of love to Christ which he himself feels within him. And here the professor 
may see an aspect of his pupil's life which he had not suspected before, and 
may more wisely and more sympathetically adapt his instruction to individ- 
ual needs. But above all, the drawing near to the Father of all, and to 
Jesus Christ the head of the church, through the Holy Spirit, in order that 
we may offer to him our worship and supplicate forgiveness and favor for 
ourselves and for mankind, is an essential to Seminary life. I make no 
doubt that from this room, with its prayers and its words of Christian expe- 
rience and exhortation, will be dated the most lasting and valuable of the 
influences of this institution. Here may the presence of God evermore abide! 
Here may Christ manifest himself as Savior and Lord ! Here may the Holy 
Spirit sanctify and energize the souls of those who are to preach to men of 
sin and of salvation ! 

Thus I have sketched the essentials and the appurtenances of a properly 
organized Theological Seminary. The ideal is surely not too high, — all that 
1 have Indicated, so far as material aids are concerned, has been already 



ITS IDEA AND ITS REQUISITES. 313 

provided in Seminaries of other denominations. To put our own Seminary 
in possession of the means to realize the plan I have laid before you would 
require indeed a large sum of money. But God has been so good to us in 
the past, and we so confidently trust that this is his own cause, that we can- 
not doubt that we shall see every tiling that has been sketched to-day, provided 
for by his good Providence. Such an institution as this is one of the most 
permanent tilings on earth. Directly connected as it is with the hopes and 
progress of the kingdom of God, remembered as it is daily in the prayers of 
God's elect, he that gives to it, gives to God, and puts his hand to a work 
that is sure to triumph. The friend who has given to us this beautiful and 
commodious building will have not only the comfort of knowing that he has 
linked himself and his name inseparably with the ever progressing cause of 
ministerial education, but for generations to come wliat lie has done will be 
a stimulus and incitement to others to lay down like precious gifts at the 
feet of Jesus our Lord. With all the other generous benefactions which 
have fallen to us for Library and for endowments, even while so many 
wants are yet unsupplied, it rouses within me something of a prophetic 
spirit. I rejoice in it most of all because it is a foregleam of the dawn, a 
sign of the coming of that final day when 'the rebuke of God's people" — ■ 
the poverty and weakness and contempt under which his cause has suffered 
— shall be taken away, and the riches of the world shall be poured into the 
treasury of the Redeemer. May God hasten the day ! And as a means of 
furthering this end, we now proceed in solemn prayer to dedicate this struc- 
ture to the glory of God and to the special work of training his ministers. 
With the offering, let us dedicate ourselves, May he generously deign to 
accept us and our gift, and to use both for the furtherance and triumph of 
his everlasting kingdom. "For of him, and through him, and unto him, are 
all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen ! " 



XXIII. 
TBAIfflNG FOE LEADERSHIP. - 



It Is a pleasant thing, on my first visit to Hamilton, to meet with so cor- 
dial a welcome. I am one of the sons of that wilful daughter of yours who. 
thirty-five years ago, ran away from home and set up a family of her own. 
These matches often turn out better than was expected. England is getting 
to be proud of America, and Hamilton to be proud of Rochester. And to- 
day, in view of all I see about me — this lovely country, this noble structure, 
these evidences of comprehensive and far-sighted liberality — I can truly say 
that Rochester is proud of Hamilton, and is glad to trace back the stream of 
her history to this sacred eminence, and through this to another that com- 
mands us both, namely, to " Sion hill" and 

" Siloa's brook that flowed 
Fast by the oracle of God." 

In dedicating this new and beautiful building, the first question one might 
well ask is: What is it for? I am not content with the obvious and com- 
mon-place answer, that it is designed to provide facilities for the education 
of ministers or preachers or pastors of our churches. That is all true — so 
true that it fails to make any great impression upon us. There is one aspect 
of our common work which has failed to receive sufficient recognition, and 
which I would emphasize to-day. Without questioning any of the other 
ends which are to be sought and attained here, I wish to speak of Training 
for Leadership in the church of Christ, as an end which of itself and by 
itself justifies all that has been given and all that has been done in the erec- 
tion of this noble hall, and in the founding and support of this whole con- 
geries of institutions. My first proposition is, that the church must have 
leaders. It is a necessity of nature. She will have them whether she wants 
them or not. Love of power is an instinct of human nature — an innocent 
and proper instinct. Men seek to acquire power over others, and ought to 
seek it, — for how else can they better the world? Christ had this love of 
power, and Satan was very artful in appealing to it when he offered him all 
the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them. The evil lay, not in 
seeking power, but in seeking it at times and in ways opposed to the will of 
the Father. So the Christian is not to give up his will, but to have more 
will; not to be devoid of ambition, but to have a holy ambition; not to 
renounce power, but to seek power and use power for God. " Seekest thou 
great things for thyself? Seek them not." But then, "Covet earnestly the 
best gifts" — gifts of government and leadership, among the rest. Christ Is 
the great Leader, Captain, Shepherd. We may well desire to be shepherds, 



* An address delivered at the dedication of the Theological Hall, Hamil- 
ton, N. Y., June 16, 18S6. 

314 



TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP. 315 

captains, leaders, under him. And so the New Testament recognizes men 
who are "over" others in the Lord, praises the elders that "rule well," 
gives to pastors the title of "bishops" or "overseers," and exhorts the 
churches to "submit" to them and to "follow" them. 

Now I am as good a Congregationalist in church government as any of 
you, and if it were necessary I could put In as many qualifications of this 
doctrine as any of you could. We have only "one Master," and "all we 
are brethren." While the government of the church as respects the divine 
source of the authority is an absolute monarchy, as respects the ascertain- 
ment and interpretation of God's will it is an absolute democracy. No man 
therefore has any business to lord it over God's heritage. Jesus says: "I 
am among you as one that serveth ; " "he that would be chief among you, 
let him be your servant." Preeminence is to be preeminence only in service. 
But nothing of all this is inconsistent with leadership in the church of Christ, 
— for this leadership is nothing but moral suasion, the natural influence of 
strong character and sagacious planning, the irresistible force of the mind 
and heart and will which the Holy Spirit has informed and energized. You 
cannot prevent such leadership, even among the Plymouth Brethren, with 
all their fear that church organizations will become machines and that pas- 
tors will become bishops. Human nature craves human leadership. It never 
will be satisfied with an abstract and distant God to worship. It must have 
a kingdom with a Son of man for King, and an army in which the chosen 
representatives of this Son of man are lieutenants and leaders. So we are 
bidden to seek out and set apart men for this sacred service, and it will be 
a great day for the church when she feels her need of men like Paul and 
Augustine and Luther and Wesley, and prays mightily to God to raise up a 
multitude of such to be leaders of his people. 

My second proposition is, that these leaders must be trained. If men are 
to be leaders, then they must be able to lead. They must themselves be in 
advance of those who are to follow. Of course I believe in natural gifts and 
endowments. Blood is thicker than water. The sons of ministers, other 
things being equal, make better ministers than their fathers were. They 
belong in the ministry, and I claim them for the Lord Jesus. I have no 
sympathy with the idea that the church must take up with what is left, after 
law and medicine and mining and journalism have had their pick. Pray 
God that more able and enthusiastic and persuasive and faithful men may 
be born. But it is not enough to be born. Nature is something, but nur- 
ture is something more. These men who are to go before their fellows in 
knowledge and zeal, in enterprise and devotion, must be trained for their 
work. Birth did a great deal for Paul, but he never would have been the 
apostle to the Gentiles, if he had not had the Rabbinic schools, and Gam- 
aliel for a teacher. Knowledge of the world, variety of environment, 
contact with broad minds, social culture, all these go to make up the differ- 
ence between a Peter and a Paul. 

I insist upon it that men can be trained for leadership, — that is, natural 
gifts can be improved. Confidence may be acquired, methods can be taught. 
There is a great deal of training for leadership outside the schools. Lead- 
ership is in large part a matter of will, of determination, of habit, of example. 
The young man sees others bravely striding to the front, and he says: "By 



31G TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP. 

God's grace 1 can do the same." Difficulty trains men. Exigency draws 
out their powers. Success in a small field prepares them for success in a 
greater. Even here in this world, he that has been faithful over a few things 
is made ruler over many things. I know that God needs men of different 
sorts in his ministry, and that he calls men of many sorts. The little coun 
try village needs a pastor, — and God raises up a man to fill that particular 
place. He needs a broad, flexible, magnetic personality for the great city, 
— and he provides such a one for that place. He needs energy, enterprise, 
intense devotion, the martyr-spirit in a foreign field,— and the man for that 
i* forthcoming. But I protest against the notion that there is a hard and 
fast line that separates these various fields — a great gulf fixed between 
them, so that no man can pass. 1 rather hold that honest work in the one 
may train one for work in another. And it is not a sin but a duty to fill the 
largest place we can, to reach the greatest number and the highest class of 
minds, to exert the strongest and most permanent influence for God. If I 
can hew down two trees for God, and yet content myself with felling one, 
I am responsible to God for the two. And if by hard work I can prepare 
myself for the larger service, if by severe training I can double my influence, 
then training is a duty. The world is perishing meantime, you say? Yes, 
but it is not perishing for lack of foolish preaching. If God had wanted 
you in the ministry before this, he would have had you born earlier. If 
he has waited for your appearance till 18S6, he can wait till you know 
something of the truth you are to preach, even if it takes till 1S9G for you 
to learn it. 

I have only one other proposition, this namely, that training for leader- 
ship is the peculiar duty of our Seminaries. By this I mean, that we fail 
in our proper purpose, if we do not make the training of leaders a determin- 
ing idea in our work. We cannot educate the whole church of Christ, nor 
all the ministers of the church. If we should attempt it, we should simply 
be swamped by a mass of material we could not manage, and the very 
heterogeneous character of that mass would put the gravest difficulty in the 
way of effectively teaching anything. The Theological Seminary never 
yet has trained, and for generations to come it will not train, even the major- 
ity of our ministers, and it is not our duty to turn it into a theological 
Kindergarten in order that it may do this. It is not our business to cover 
the whole field of education, even in the case of those whom we do teach. 
We cannot give instruction in all the departments of human knowledge. 
We cannot teach the elements of English. We cannot teach the elements 
of Greek. We ought not to teach even the elements of Hebrew. The ele- 
ments of English belong to the common school ; the elements of Greek 
belong to the academy ; the elements of Hebrew properly belong to the 
college, — and it was once an honor to Madison University that she, almost 
alone of the colleges, recognized this fact. The Theological Seminary is not 
a common school, nor an academy, nor a college, and we need practically to 
insist upon this, if we intend to train the leaders of religious thought and 
life for the coming generation. Let us insist upon it that the men who enter 
our Seminaries shall, as a condition of admission, give evidence either that 
they have had the drill of the common school, the academy and the college, 
or that they have pursued studies which fit them to do efficient work in the 
same classes with common school. acad< my and college graduates. 



TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP. 317 

But now, granting that we have the right men to teach, and that we do 
not attempt to teach everything, how may we best arrange our Seminary 
work so as to train men for leadership? I reply that we must first give men 
faith — something to believe, and then belief in that something. — belief in 
its importance, belief in its right to rule, and belief in the God who has 
power to make it rule. You never can lead other people unless you arc 
thoroughly persuaded yourself; no doubts, no fears, — because you know that 
you have truth and God upon your side. And so the teaching of doctrinal 
and ethical truth is the first way in which the Theological Seminary can 
make men leaders. But there is a right way and a wrong way of teaching 
that truth, — the one way will help men to be leaders, and the other will not. 
There is the critical, the polemic, the apologetic way, — a way that makes a 
man sharp-scented for heresy, eager for theological warfare, interested in 
doctrine because of its purely intellectual and speculative aspect, — and I 
wish to say with all emphasis that the merely speculative and closet theolo- 
gian will never be a leader of men. He is too narrow. He has mastered 
the truth, but the truth has never mastered him. There is a broader sort of 
study — study with the heart as well as with the intellect, study that fills 
the soul with truth, and makes it seem a priceless possession which it would 
be cowardice and sin not to give to others, so that it may make them free as 
it has made us free. It is the constructive and not the destructive habit of 
mind that we need to cultivate, the spirit of the propagandist, in the best 
sense of that word, by which I mean the spirit that merges self in the truth, 
until it has but one end in life — to bring men to the knowledge and obedi- 
ence of the truth. 

But even this does not exhaust the list of our responsibilities and duties 
in the Seminary. Men who are merely possessed of the truth, and eager for 
its triumphs, may be fanatics — with no ability to adapt it to the actual wants 
and conditions of men. If we would make men leaders, therefore, we must 
make our courses of study excel on the practical as well as on the theoretical 
side. The men who teach in the Theological Seminary should, where this 
is possible, be men who have had not only practical experience as pastors, 
but practical success as pastors. There should be constant practice in Sun- 
day school and mission work in connection with the scholastic duties of the 
Institution, and at least occasional preaching should be encouraged, in order 
that the student may have continually in view the end to which he is to 
address his labors. He must learn to bring himself, and so to bring the 
truth, in contact with men. All true leadership is simply leading individual 
men. You cannot lead men in the mass. You cannot lead men by preach- 
ing alone. They will not believe that you care for them, unless you come 
to them privately and personally ; and you cannot get other Christians to 
go after them, unless you set the example of going after them yourself. If 
I might be permitted to speak of my own experience, I would say that the 
critical points in my history as a minister have been, not so much the times 
of preparation for sermons, as the times when after long struggle I brought 
myself to go to individual men and talk to them about their souls; or when 
I took my life in my hand to remonstrate with some erring Christian ; or 
when I summoned up all my energies to ask some man of wealth for money 
for God's cause. And I think that the power to do this work is largely the 



318 TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP. 

result of the example of Christian instructors and teachers. I appeal to you 
who are before me, if the words of private counsel which your teachers spoke 
to you in your youth did not do more for you than their formal instructions 
in the class-room. My dear brethren who teach in Theological Seminaries, 
let us appreciate this power that we have of private and personal influence 
upon our students. We can teach them best how to lead others, only by 
showing them that we are leaders ourselves. We can give to men who 
thought they never could do this work, the confidence that God can make 
them mighty, first of all to lead others to Christ, and then to lead them into 
the paths of Christian obedience and service. Let there be such a spirit of 
intellectual and religious life in these institutions, that the men who go out 
of them shall feel that they are not only bound to conquer circumstances 
and to lead men, but that with the help of God's Holy Spirit they can do 
it and will do it. 

West Point is an institution where not the whole army is taught, nor yet 
all the officers of the army, but a few who can be fitted by natural i 
and severe discipline to lead the rest. Training for leadership is the central 
idea of the Military Academy. Training for leadership should be the 
central idea of the Theological Seminary. Do you say that I narrow down 
unduly the range of Seminary work and of Seminary influence? I answer. 
I divide only to conquer. I would insist on the highest and widest culture 
at the top, only that the whole body of the ministry who have not enjoyed 
such advantages, may be stimulated to secure them. Education is not like 
vapor that rises, but like water that runs downward, from its source. Make 
the demands of the professional school greater, and the colleges will be 
forced to meet them, even as the growing demands of the colleges have to 
be met by our preparatory schools. I should be glad if this occasion could 
be improved by us who represent the theological schools of our denomina- 
tion, so as to secure unity of action in maintaining the efficiency, and 
advancing the standard of our common work. But I remember what hap- 
pened to that wise man among the Maories of New Zealand. The mission- 
ary asked the chief, why it was that the tribe had put him to death. And 
the reply was simply: 'He gave us so much good advice, that we had to." 
While I wish all goood things to all the Seminaries represented here, and 
especially to the Hamilton Theological Seminary which so hospitably enter- 
tains us, I remember the fate of that heathen sage, aud take my seat before 
a worse thing happens to me. 



XXIX. 
AEE OUR COLLEGES CHRISTIAN. - 



The opening sermon of the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian 
Church, delivered by its retiring moderator, Dr. Herriek Johnson, was 
chiefly devoted to setting forth the dearth of candidates for the ministry. 
Many startling facts were adduced, drawn mainly from the statistics of his 
own church, but all tending to show that, while there is a constantly increas- 
ing demand for men, there is a constantly diminishing supply. He compares 
the two decades — 1850-60 and 1S70-S0. During the first decade, twelve 
colleges furnished in the aggregate 5,011 graduates, of whom 1.4SG, or 29% 
per cent., entered the ministry. During the last decade, these same colleges 
furnished in the aggregate 5,034 graduates, of whom 963, or only 19 per 
cent., entered the ministry. Dr. Johnson predicts a ministerial famine, if 
this state of things is suffered to continue. 

Other denominations, besides the Presbyterians, have observed like facts 
within their own borders, and have felt a similar alarm. With greater or 
less degrees of emphasis, Episcopalians. Methodists, Congregationalists and 
Baptists, and in our own denomination Drs. Hovey and Elder especially, 
have called attention to the danger, and have sought to trace it to its sources. 
Dr. Herriek Johnson rather summarily dismisses some of the common 
explanations, such as the trials and inadequate support of the ministry, the 
brilliant inducements held out by other callings, the intellectual demands 
made upon the modern preacher, and the lack of sufficient provision for 
college education. 'With regard to this last, he asserts that the colleges have 
more students, but fewer candidates. He very correctly ascribes the evil 
mainly to the merely secular and business view of the ministry which has 
come to obtain in our churches, and which has so largely supplanted the 
older and truer view of the ministry as a gift of God, for which the churches 
are dependent upon God, and for which they ought continually to pray. 

If I were in any respect to criticise so excellent a presentation of the sub- 
ject as Dr. Johnson has given us, I should do so upon the ground of its 
incompleteness. I should describe this secular view of the ministry as 
merely one mark of our age — an age of physical research and invention, of 
materialistic philosophy, and of worldly thought and ambition ; and the 
recollection that the pendulum of thought is never stationary would furnish 
me with the basis for a prediction that we shall soon see, if indeed we are 
not already seeing, signs of a swing in the opposite direction of an idealistic 
and spiritual method of thought and action. I should also call attention to 
the fact that the evil spirit of the present age has to a considerable extent 



Printed in the Examiner, July 19, 18S3. 
319 



320 ARE OUR COLLEGES CHRISTIAN? 

succeeded in infecting our colleges, and that one important means of intro- 
ducing the better day will be the bringing back of these institutions of 
learning to the spirit and methods of their founders. I am persuaded that, 
when our colleges become truly Christian, we shall have no lack of students 
for the ministry. 

It is for a brief consideration of this last division of the subject, that what 
I have thus far said has prepared the way. There can be no doubt that our 
colleges — and by our colleges I mean simply our higher denominational 
schools — were intended to be Christian, in some more definite and palpable 
sense than that in which a college established and supported by the State 
can be said to be Christian ; in some more definite and palpable sense than 
that in which the State itself can be said to be Christian. What is a Chris- 
tian college, and what are its aims? It seems to me that a Christian college 
is an institution established and endowed by Christian people — people who 
believe in Christ as God and Savior, — to promote the kingdom of Christ by 
training young men's highest powers, intellectual, social and religious, for 
the service of Christ in the Church or in the State. That is not in the sense 
of the founders a Christian college, in which Christianity is something 
merely tacit and nominal. That only is a Christian college, in which Chris- 
tianity is the confessed and formative principle of its whole organization, 
method and life. That only is a Christian college, which aims, by a truly 
liberal and Christian culture, to bring young men to Christ, to teach them 
of Christ, and to train them for Christ. 

Let me analyze this idea, and separate the various elements that go to 
make it up. In a properly Christian college, first of all, it would seem that 
all the instructors should be actively Christian men. Theoretical belief is 
not enough. Christian profession is not enough. Mere technical mastery 
of a given department of knowledge, even when supplemented by ability to 
communicate, is only half of a true teacher's stock in trade. The other half 
is a certain mass of manhood. Personality counts for as much as instruc- 
tion. — indeed, no true instruction is possible without a vigorous personality. 
It is the man that teaches, quite as much as his words. Now, in a Christian 
college, this manhood should be Christian manhood ; this personality should 
be Christian personality. I know of no way of testing the tree but by its 
fruits. In every teacher of a Christian college, theoretical belief in Christ 
as Savior and God, should be accompanied by practical devotion to the 
service of Christ, and by active cooperation with Christ's appointed means 
— the ministry and the church. 

In the second place, a Christian college should give actual Christian 
instruction, — in the word of God, the greatest classic ; in the story of the 
church, the greatest history ; in the doctrines of the Bible, the greatest 
science ; in Christian ethics, the noblest morality. Why should the Chris- 
tian Scriptures be the only great master-piece of literature unrepresented in 
the college curriculum? Why should Christian Theology be the only great 
science the elements of which are not taught in a college course? There 
are many ways of teaching religion, and I care not which of them is chosen ; 
I only claim that religion should be systematically tar.ght. Some of the 
greatest lawyers and statesmen of New England, in the last generation, 
ascribed their first understanding of the principles of government and law 



ARE OUR COLLEGES CHRISTIAN? 321 

to the doctrinal sermons of President Dwight, to which they listened when 
they were students at Yale. So long as the truth about God is the founda- 
tion of all other truth, it should form a fundamental part of the instruction 
of a Christian college. 

The third requisite to a Christian college is, that its discipline and instruc- 
tion should be pervaded with a Christian spirit. It is hard to put it into 
any form of words, but every one must see that only that college can be 
distinctively Christian in which high moral standards are insisted upon, in 
which sobriety and purity, honesty and honor are required as conditions of 
membership in the institution, — and required of teachers and students alike. 
The influence of a single teacher who is known to be intemperate or immoral, 
will destroy the force of all the formal instruction in ethics which such an 
institution can furnish, and will serve as an example and excuse for the 
worst excesses on the part of the students. The unreprehended practice of 
arts of deception in the recitation-room saps the very life of character, and 
the student who is lost to truth soon becomes lost to shame. The spirit of 
Christian courtesy and brotherhood- — the docile and receptive mind and 
manner on the part of the students, the friendly and communicative temper 
on the part of those who teach — this social and mutually helpful spirit must 
be characteristic of the college, or it ceases to be Christian. "Dumb, driven 
cattle" on the one hand, and the rough task-master on the other, may 
despoil it of all that makes it worthy of the name. 

Last of all, the Christian college should have for its one great aim to make 
its students servants of Christ — ministers of Christ or helpers of his church. 
It need not make all it students preachers — it should aim to make every 
soul of them a Christian. It should teach that life is thrown away unless 
spent in the service of the King. Not natural or political science first in 
importance, nor public honors most to be sought for, but the service of 
Christ, the truth of Christ, the favor of Christ — these are the most noble, 
the most beneficent, the most satisfying. And then this teaching should be 
supplemented by personal work, on the part of teachers and Christian stu- 
dents alike, for the conversion of souls. Amherst and Oberlin have shown 
how mighty an influence may be exerted by a few determined and devoted 
Christian men, when banded together in a college faculty, to infuse their 
own spirit into a multitude of Christian students, and to draw the great 
mass of the unconverted members of the college to Christ. The college 
prayer-meeting should be as regular a resort of the Professor as is his lec- 
ture-room. And the effort, by all manner of social and friendly intercourse, 
to effect the salvation of his pupils, should seem more important to him 
than to secure a high record of scholarship, — although I am persuaded that 
the latter will be greatly furthered by the former. 

I have thus set forth what seem to me the requisites of a Christian col- 
lege. It is interesting to know that in the Gymnasia of Germany — which 
most nearly of the German schools answer to our colleges, differing from 
them mainly in carrying their studies no further than to the end of our 
Junior year — most of the branches usually pursued in our Theological 
Seminaries are taught in an elementary though systematic form, and are 
taught to all. The Bible is studied from end to end ; Hebrew is taught as 
well as Greek ; church history and dogmatics form a part of the regular 
21 



322 ARE OUR COLLEGES CHRISTIAN? 

course. And all this In institutions supported by tho State, and by no means 
as a part of a training for tbe ministry, but as necessarily belonging to the 
liberal culture which every educated citizen should possess. Something like 
this was designed by the founders of our colleges. A knowledge of Hebrew 
and of Christian doctrine was once thought indispensable to a liberal train- 
ing. Can any one doubt that such a scheme comes nearer to the idea of a 
Christian education than many of the schemes of instruction which now 
obtain in our so-called Christian colleges? 

It is simple truth, though it may be unwelcome truth, that many of our 
colleges have ceased to be Christian, and that others are in danger of follow- 
ing their example. The spirit of iudifferentism and agnosticism has invaded 
our temples of learning, until institutions originally dedicated to Christ and 
his church aspire to give a secular rather than a religious training. Now if 
this were merely the throwing off of a narrow denominationalism, we might 
have sympathy with it. I want no denominational college, in the sense of a 
machine for the propagation of the tenets of a particular denomination — a 
school for teaching a peculiar sort of ecclesiology. But the true denomina- 
tional college — the college of which a particular body of Christians takes 
charge, in which it has pride, to which it gives its sons, its contributions 
and its prayers, and from which it looks for its leaders and teachers — the 
college which opens its doors freely to men of every creed, but which says 
to all: "No training is truly liberal which is not truly Christian; such 
training, and no other, we offer you" — such colleges as these are an indis- 
pensable need of our time, and all our education will play into the hands of 
unbelief, immorality and anarchy, when such colleges as these are lost to us. 

The denominational college that is ashamed of Christ had better die. It 
will die, so far as its power for good is concerned. There can be no neu- 
trality, and the intellectual activity that ceases to be Christian will soon 
become hostile to Christianity. It will die, so far as its support is concerned, 
for the Christian men, who took interest in it as a helper to the kingdom of 
Christ, will leave it when it ceases to be distinctively religious, and will 
send their sons either to other denominational colleges that are faithful 
to their trust, or to the larger and better endowed colleges of the State. A 
truly Christian college will appeal to the most sacred feelings and convic- 
tions of Christian people; will draw forth their most generous gifts; will 
attract from all parts of the land the sons of the land's best and noblest 
men. Such a college will be a light and a joy, not only to all the land, but 
to the whole earth. But if our denominational colleges are to be no more 
Christian than our State colleges, then the sooner they cease to be, the bet- 
ter; for the only valid argument for their separate and continued existence 
is that they alone can be pronouncedly and effectively Christian. 

While I recognize with gratitude the progress which our colleges have 
made in certain literary and scientific directions, I urge, in this one respect 
of their Christian character, a return to the methods of the past, and a care- 
ful watching of their tendencies for the future. A great work has been 
done ; but the times in which we live demand a new faithfulness to Christ in 
our systems of education. The compromising, secular spirit, if admitted to 
control, will prove the ruin of the cause which these institutions were estab- 
lished to further. Not in such ways have our past triumphs been won. 



ARE OUR COLLEGES CHRISTIAN? 323 

When I looked the other day, at Saratoga, upon the hundred and ten men 
from the University and the Theological Seminary at Rochester, who had 
gathered for a brief hour to recount their common experiences, and to express 
their gratitude to the institutions that had sent them forth, I thanked God 
and took courage. And when that body of men, who have certainly infused 
into our denomination a new spirit and impulse of Christian service, com- 
missioned me to convey to Presidents Anderson and Robinson their deep sense 
of the inestimable benefits they had received from their teachings and from 
their example, I said to myself: "The school-master is abroad. The Chris- 
tian school master is not dead. The Christian college still lives. Let us, with 
God's help, make it all that its name imports — all that it ought to be." 



XXX. 
NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION; 



My dear brother, after a protracted course of study, and after some 
preliminary work in which you have tested your strength, you have been 
honored by the call of our oldest Theological Seminary to be one of its 
corps of instructors, and by the ordination of this church and council to be 
a recognized minister of Jesus Christ. Between your election as teacher, 
and your setting apart as minister, there is a very natural connection. The 
work you are to do in expounding the New Testament is in itself a preaching 
of the gospel, and ordination to that work, after careful examination by the 
representatives of the churches, is by just so much the more proper and 
important, as the teaching of the teachers is a more responsible and difficult 
service than the preaching of the Gospel to an ordinary congregation. We 
need guarantees that the man intrusted with such responsibilities knows the 
truth which he proposes to teach, believes in its divine authority, has some 
sense of a call of God to interpret it. and some assurance of the aid of the 
Holy Spirit in his work. With regard to all of these matters, this after- 
noon's examination has laid to rest all doubts in the mind of either church 
or council, and we have proceeded to publish to the world our vote setting 
you apart to the gospel ministry, with an unusual conviction that in so 
doing we are only recognizing and ratifying what God has done before us. 
I congratulate you upon the new light that is thus thrown upon your own 
path and your own duty; upon the practical settlement of all questions with 
regard to your vocation and place of labor ; and upon the manifest wisdom 
of God that has guided you. when blind, by a way that you knew not, and 
has led you at length to this opportunity of exceeding usefulness and of 
permanent influence upon the ministry and the churches of Jesus Christ. 

The task has been assigned me, by the council, of giving to you a charge 
with regard to the duties, the methods, and the spirit, of your new work. 
I take pleasure in doing this, because I have known you so well, and have 
such confidence that you will be faithful. But the charge must be a peculiar 
charge. It will not be the ordinary charge to one who is to be pastor of a 
church, for you are not called to be a pastor. It will not deal with the 
merely common-place and superficial duties of your vocation, for these are 
patent to you already. It will not be dogmatic or assertatory, for no inde- 
pendent mind can be benefited by a substitution of the oracles of man for 
the oracles of God. I shall only attempt, in the brief time allotted me. to 
mention certain modern requisites to success in the department of teaching 



* A Charge to the Candidate, at the Ordination of Mr. Ernest D. Burton, 
Acting Professor-elect in Newton Theological Institution ; Rochester, June 
22, 1883. 

324 






NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION. 325 

to which you are to devote yourself — the department of New Testament 
Language and Interpretation. 

My first suggestion is, that you teach thoroughly. I do not now speak 
of mere accuracy in the matter of Greek forms, or of precise methods of 
statement in explaining them. I use the word thorough in its etymological 
sense. That is thorough, which goes through a subject — goes to the bottom 
of it. Modern scholarship is instinct with this spirit. It cannot tolerate a 
mere half-truth, when the whole truth is attainable. It cannot tolerate 
dogmatism upon a narrow basis of investigation. You will find students 
who will expect of you thorough work, and who will give you their confi- 
dence, only as you show that you have done thorough work before forming 
your opinions. There are certain questions of grammar, like the telic use 
of iva or the meaning of the aorist ; questions of chronology, like the date 
of the Savior's birth, cr the definition of the feast in John's fifth chapter; 
questions as to the origin and date of the gospels ; questions as to relative 
value of manuscript authorities ; and these are questions upon which weighty 
results hang, and jet questions difficult to settle. The teacher of New 
Testament Greek must have an opinion upon them — an opinion of his own. 
But his opinion will be of little value to himself, or to his classes, unless it 
has been formed by prolonged and original investigation. On some of these 
questions, at least, he must show that he has formed such opinions, and has 
formed tb»m in a safe way. This cannot be done all at once. No one has 
a right to expect a new teacher to have personally settled, at the very start, 
all the difficult questions of exegesis and theology. He must make his 
strong points, teach with emphasis what he knows, and for the rest refer to 
text-books written by others, or induce the student to investigate for himself. 
But though time is required, and long study goes to the solution of the more 
important problems, it is still possible for the teacher, year by year, to 
master one difficulty after another, and at last to give his teaching something 
like completeness and organic unity. As a help to this, let me urge you 
always, and from the very beginning, to have on your hands and before your 
eyes some one point of investigation of fundamental importance, upon 
which you are turning your most concentrated and continuous thought, with 
a view to putting the results into compact and written form. Nothing is 
mere valuable to the teacher than to hold himself to the not infrequent, and 
somewhat regular, publication of articles upon special topics in his depart- 
ment. The prospect of a wider audience than that of the lecture-room, and 
of being judged by his peers, will stimulate him to harder work than he 
would otherwise be apt to do. Thoroughness and depth are not so easy 
as superficiality. But they are essential to good teaching, and the true 
teacher will not content himself without knowing more, about certain vital 
points of his subject, than is known by any other man in the world. 

But there is a second characteristic of good teaching, that I would have 
you cultivate. I mean breadth. It is as important as depth. It is quite 
possible for the expounder of Scripture to be so minute and microscopic, in 
his examination of a passage, that all sense of its general scope and power 
vanishes from the mind of the pupil. While instances of absolutely exhaust- 
ive investigation are given, and given in sufficient number to teach the 
student a method and to put within him an impulse, the time giv^n to 



326 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION. 

exegetical study in our Seminaries is all too brief to permit the teacher to 
go over any large portion of Scripture in this way. Reading considerable 
sections of the New Testament, whole Gospels and whole Epistles, at a rate 
which the minute exegete would regard as very rapid, and reading thein 
mainly with a view to their broad general sweep of meaning, is just as 
important as the careful and exhaustive study of a few important passages. 
You are well aware that English exegesis has passed through several stages, 
such as the homiletical stage represented by Matthew Henry, the gram- 
ma tical stage represented by Ellicott, and the historical stage represented 
by Lightfoot. I think it cannot be doubted that Lightfoot's Commentaries 
mark a great advance in the characteristic I am commending, namely, that 
of breadth. More attention is paid to introduction, to analysis of the portion 
of Scripture under treatment, to context, to the historical setting. Matthew 
Arnold's dictum, that the Scriptures must be interpreted as literature, has a 
certain truth in it, and a truth that must not be neglected. But how plain it 
is, that this broad treatment of the New Testament writings is safe and val- 
uable only in the hands of a broad man. Much material is accessible to him 
in the voluminous literature of his subject both in English and in German, 
and of the German instruments of investigation he cannot long afford to be 
ignorant. A mind of philosophical tendencies, that by a sort of necessity 
reduces scattered facts to order and expresses results in a lucid and articu- 
late way — such a mind is one of the greatest elements of success in this 
broad sort of teaching, and such a mind we credit you with possessing. 
But there are many other helps to breadth. You must give yourself to a 
wide range of reading. All history, all science, all master-pieces of human 
genius in painting and sculpture, in epic and tragic poetry, in eloquence and 
state-craft and invention, can help the interpretation of the word of God,— 
for these things help us to know man, man's thoughts, man's language, man's 
ways, — and, as man was made in the image of God, we may find in these 
things, as in a concave mirror, a faint and miniature reflection of the divine. 
But this is not enough. The mere book-worm cannot be a good interpreter. 
The teacher of the New Testament must be a full man, with social sympa- 
thies, in with the life of his times, knowing something by personal observa- 
tion of its currents of opinion, mixing with cultivated people and getting 
stimulus from their talk, interesting himself, and so far as possible partici- 
pating, in the political and the denominational movements of the day in 
which he lives. All this I say to you with the more emphasis, from the fact 
that you go to your work with no preliminary experience in the pastoral 
office and no great practice in preaching. Avail yourself of all opportunities 
to preach which you can use consistently with your main duty of teaching. 
Mingle with men. It will not hurt your work, but further it. It will give 
you illustrations for your class-room. It will put life aud reality into your 
expositions of Paul and John. 

I exhort you, in the third place, to boldness. Natural modesty is an 
admirable thing, — but when it becomes self depreciation and timidity it may 
hinder much good. I would have you bold in your thinking. Biblical 
interpreters have for ages followed one another like a flock of sheep. No 
one conversant with the commentaries, has failed to note how certain early 
and sometimes perverse opinions have repeated themselves, often in similar 



NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION. 327 

of words, from generation to generation. It is a sort of visiting the 
sins of the fathers upon the children, which should be a warning to us. 
There is such a thing as the right of private judgment, and most men recog- 
nize it. They do not so often recognize the duty of private judgment. It 
is particularly necessary that a teacher of exegesis should form in his pupils 
the habit of investigating and of deciding the meaning of the word of God 
for themselves. To stereotype certain traditional interpretations, and to 
transmit to posterity a number of lifeless copies of them, might have seemed 
a worthy work to the mediaeval scholastic, but it ought not to seem a worthy 
work to us. But if the teacher is to make his pupils independent, he must 
be independent himself. He must come to the conclusion, with all proper 
humility, that with the help of the Holy Spirit, he has a right to his own 
opinion, and that, in a matter of interpretation, his opinion Is as good as any- 
body's — at any rate is the only opinion which he can safely utter and act 
upon. It is a great epoch in one's history — and it is often marked by great 
struggle and prostration before God — when a teacher resolves that, come 
what will, he will follow the light he has, and will stand for what he thinks 
to be the truth. Then only, he begins to be a living force in the world of 
thought. Then only, his real powers begin to manifest themselves. If 
Christian teachers had always refused to say things, simply because others 
had said them, and had set themselves to publish the truth of Scripture as 
God made it known to them, the whole circle of theological sciences would 
have been lifted to a higher plane than that upon which they stand to-day, 
— and I venture to say that no seminary of our denomination would deprive 
its teachers of this independence. It is assumed that your general convic- 
tions are in harmony with those of the denomination and of the Seminary 
where you give instruction, and that, when they cease to be so, you will as 
an honest man resign your place. But this binds you to no narrow follow- 
ing of other men. You are to do independent work, as a teacher of God's 
word. And, if your conclusions should in any given case differ from those 
of your colleagues, you have the right to express your view, so long as you 
treat the opposing view with fairness and respect. It is not your main 
business to teach dogmatic theology, — but your department has intimate rela- 
tions to dogmatic theology, and when you are asked in what direction any 
particular passage of Paul's epistles seems to tend, you have a right to state 
what are to your own mind its dogmatic implications. General uniformity 
of view in the Faculty of a Theological Seminary is indispensable. Division 
and party-spirit are fatal to its general influence. But absolute uniformity 
of thinking is impossible among differently constituted men ; and, if it were 
possible, it would be a sure sign of intellectual stagnation, and of a mechani- 
cal sort of faith. Before your colleagues, then, as before your pupils, be 
yourself, and none other. Have a holy trust under God in your own powers, 
■ — you are set as a witness for God and you have the promise of his Spirit. 
Resolve nobly that you will strike out your own course. Let no man call 
you master. Let no man despise your youth. Find the lines upon which 
you can best lay out your strength. In those lines do your own thinking. 
And when you have by original and prayerful investigation reached results, 
utter them with energy of voice and manner; defend them against all 
comers ; make your classes feel the mass and force of your own conviction ; 



328 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION. 

stir them up by the vividness and insistence of your faith ; makes them fight 
or surrender. A teacher who holds to nothing with earnestness may seem 
to succeed in his teaching, — but his success is due to the subject and not tc 
the man. In the hands of a real teacher, even a subject of inferior moment 
seems dignified and important. May God help you, by the boldness of your 
teaching, to make the New Testament seem sublime. 

But this leads me to the last of my suggestions. It is this: Be reverent. 
There is a fairy story that tells of a prince led to door after door of an 
enchanted castle, and finding inscribed over every door the words: "Be 
bold!" Animated by the apparent invitation, he tries each door succes- 
sively, and it opens to his touch. But he comes at last to a door over which 
is written: "Be not too bold!" and to open that door is peril and death. 
So there is a limit to all human wisdom and power — a limit to the knowl- 
edge possible to man. There is a point where boldness should cease, even 
though it be the holy boldness of the saints, and we should fall on our faces 
before the majesty and authority of divine revelation. You will bear me 
witness, that all thought of a human reason that is the ultimate criterion or 
source of truth is foreign and abhorrent to me. In all that I have said with 
regard to thoroughness, breadth, boldness, as characteristics of true teach- 
ing in the department of theology which you are to cultivate, I have taken 
it for granted that you recognize the Bible as the word of God, inspired in 
every part, the only and infallible rule of faith and practice. Without such 
a sheet anchor as this faith in God's word furnishes, the thoroughness, 
breadth and boldness which I have inculcated would only be wind and steam 
and current to drive your vessel upon the rocks. And though I know that 
your faith is sound, let me formally and solemnly remind you that only 
absolute confidence in that word of God, and absorbing love for it as the 
eternal truth that is able to make us wise unto salvation, could justify you 
for a single moment in entering upon the great work to which you are 
called. Let me remind you that the man who interprets the Scriptures, and 
who studies them in a thorough way, has his peculiar dangers and tempta- 
tions. He becomes acquainted with subtle objections and difficulties of 
which the ordinary Christian knows nothing. There are sprung upon him 
at times powerful and almost overwhelming assaults of skepticism. And 
often he can have no human helper — he must meet these attacks alone. At 
such times, if he be a merely professed, or a weak or sluggish, Christian, 
his faith, such as it is, may be undermined, honey-combed, annihilated. 
But if he be a strong Christian, full of love for God and for his word, his 
soul will be stirred within him; the very ark of God's covenant will seem to 
be attacked ; he will be led to new discoveries of its impregnable defenses ; 
the result will be only new arguments for the Bible, and a more solid con- 
viction of its everlasting truth. How tremendous are the interests at stake, 
when a teacher of teachers wavers in his faith and propagates his unbelief 
to others, — each student whom he instructs communicating the evil spirit to 
a thousand others, and they to other thousands, through the long succession 
of the years ! To break one of Christ's least commandments and to teach 
men so, is to make ourselves the least in the kingdom of heaven. Where 
6hall they be found, who seek to undermine the foundations of the kingdom 
of God on earth, by destroying the faith of God's elect? 



NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION. 329 

My brother, I know that you realize your responsibility, and that you do 
not take to yourself this office of teaching the future ministers of Christ's 
churches. God has put it upon you, and I gladly commend you to him who 
qualifies every servant of his for his work. The only thing that can carry 
you through the arduous task before you, is the strength of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. Paul asked: 'Who is sufficient for these things?" But he 
answered his own question: "'Truly our sufficiency is from God, who hath 
made us able ministers of the New Testament." Such an able minister and 
teacher of the New Testament, may God make you to be ! I pray that he 
will give you — I believe that he will give you— great joy and success in 
your work, and that he will make you, according to the measure of your 
powers, a means of enlarging the circle of Christian knowledge, of fitting 
his ministers for their sacred work, of drawing the church nearer to the 
heart of Clu'ist, and of hastening the triumph of his kingdom in the world. 

" And for the rest, in weariness, 
In disappointment and distress, 
When strength decays and hope grows dim, 
We ever may recur to him 

Who has the golden oil divine 
Wherewith to feed our failing urns, — 
Who watches every lamp that burns 

Before his sacred shrine." 



XXXI. 
A GREAT TEACHER OF GREEK EXEGESIS/ 



The hushed and intense silence of this funeral-scene is not without a 
meaning. We recognize by instinct the limits of the earthly, and standing 
upon its verge, we wait for some voice from beyond the darkness and the 
shadow. Human words are well, but now we listen for some word of God 
from the solemn quietudes and the eternal spaces into which our teacher and 
friend has vanished — some word that may tell us where and how the spirit 
fares that a few days since was with us, but now is not. 

How fully this great need is met by Scripture ! As we wait and listen, we 
too hear a voice from heaven, saying, "Write, Blessed are the dead which 
die in the Lord, from henceforth : Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may 
rest from their labors; and their works do follow them." No interval of 
blank unconsciousness, — no doubt as to their felicity, — no interruption of 
their work for Christ. Activity, service, — these ha*-e not ceased. But labor, 
with its painfulness and sighing, its weakness and fear. — this has ceased, 
because, in the perfect union of the soul with its glorified Lord, all the 
imperfection and sin from which it springs have been done away forever. 
Into that rest of pure, rapturous and enlarged activity, the freed soul has 
entered. 

And shall the long toil of the earthly life go for nothing, now that the 
soul is sundered from the body? Ah, no! The good men do is not "interred 
with their bones." It rises clear- voiced before God's throne. It witnesses 
to the reality and power of Christ's life in those who wrought it. "By their 
deeds shall they be justified," not because these furnish the ground of their 
acceptance and reward, but because these deeds make manifest to the uni- 
verse the fact that "God was in them of a truth." 

Nor shall these good deeds be lost on earth. "Their works shall follow 
them," even here. Embalmed in the memory of their children and of the 
church, they shall continue their influence of blessing, all the more precious 
and powerful for good now that the heart that prompted them is still and 
pulseless in the dust. And when the memory of their work shall fade on 
earth, and the last survivors of those who knew them shall be gathered to 
their fathers, God will not permit its fruits to die. No ! no ! There is a 
memory that never lets go that which is committed to it; there is a hand 
that never ceases to tend and water the seeds of its own planting; there is a 
divine pride and justice that never suffers the earthly work of his departed 
servants to go unfruitful or unrewarded. God takes up that work after the 
workers are dead, and carries it on. Through a thousand means of spoken 



• An Address at the Funeral of Professor Hr#\itio B. Hackett, D. D., in 
the Second Baptist Church, Rochester. November 5. 1875. 

330 



A GREAT TEACHER OP GREEK EXEGESIS. SSI 

word or living example, the influence they have exerted multiplies as it goes 
down through the ages. The works of the righteous follow them, ever 
increasing in weight and power as they go onward, like the balls of moist 
snow which school-boys roll upon the ground in early winter, until, in 
the great day of account, those who did them are amazed at the surpassing 
grandeur of the result, and gazing at the vastness of the harvest which has 
sprung from the small seeds they sowed, they call to the Judge: "Lord, 
when saw we thee an hungered, or athirst," — or did anything worthy of such 
abundant fruit ! 

It is only doing our part in fulfilling the declaration of Scripture, it is 
only performing a sacred duty to those who are left behind, when we speak 
to-day of the work and the character of a departed father and teacher in 
Israel. Far be it from us to glorify the name of man. The funeral-day is 
the day on which to recognize chiefly the sovereignty and grace of God. 
And he whose mortal remains lie before us, would have been the last to 
desire any other use of this occasion. We will not deal in eulogy. We give 
only a brief and simple memorial of one whose life and labors have become 
an inseparable part of the history of Biblical learning in America and in the 
world, and we do this, not for the praise of man, but for the glory of God's 
grace and for a testimony to those who come after. 

With the second quarter of the present century, there commenced, both 
upon the Continent and in English-speaking lands, a reaction against the 
rationalism that had for so long a time poisoned and enfeebled the science 
of Scripture interpretation. Neander, Tholuck and Winer, in the several 
departments of history, exegesis and grammar, were showing the possibility 
of combining a scientific accuracy with a more evangelical faith, — nay, of 
delivering these special provinces of knowledge from the despoiling hands 
of a skeptical philosophy, by the very means of that believing spirit which 
the so-called philosophy despised. A new vitality and power was felt to 
pervade the Scriptures. New confidence was put in their accuracy of detail. 
The old apologies for Paul's slip-shod use of one Greek adjective or prepo- 
sition, when he meant another, were shown to be wholly gratuitous. And 
upon the basis of a rigid and exhaustive grammatical and lexical analysis, 
the fair edifice of the nineteenth century exegesis and theology was built. 

The new faith in Scripture and devotion to its study crossed the Atlantic, 
and found an impersonation in Moses Stuart of Andover. His incredible 
industry and contagious enthusiasm roused in this country a new love for 
Biblical studies. One of his pupils, however, who drank in, like a kindred 
spirit, his impassioned zeal for research and for teaching, went further than 
his master. Horatio B. Hackett betook himself to the German sources of 
knowledge, and above all to the New Testament original, felt himself com- 
pelled to adopt the Baptist faith as the result, and with an exacter scholar- 
ship than that of Stuart, made himself for a whole half-eenutry, the Nestor 
and leader of Greek exegesis in a denomination, which, during that same 
period, grew from half the number, till it counted a million and three-quar- 
ters of souls. This, as it seems to us, was the signficance of Dr. Hackett's 
position and work. Chase, and Conant, and Kendrick, were laboring with 
a like aim in related departments, but it was Dr. Hackett, who, more than 
any other man, formed the spirit and led the distinctive work of exact and 



332 A GREAT TEACHER OF GREEK EXEGESIS. 

believing study of New Testament Greek in a great body of Christians, 
which, partly by reasoD of this same progress in knowledge and love of the 
word of God, raised themselves during his life-time from numerical weakness 
to numerical power. He taught the teachers of hundreds of thousands of 
Christians throughout the laud. And though many threads of human influ- 
ence are woven together in the fabric of our denominational progress, we 
are safe in saying that our position in intelligence and influence to-day is 
in large part the result of the life and work of Horatio B. Hackett. 

But the influence of his work extended beyond the bounds of our denomi- 
nation, even as his sympathies and aims were broadly Christian, rather than 
sectarian. One of the most thorough scholars and one of the ablest men of 
the Congregational body said to me some years ago, that he regarded Dr. 
Hackett as the best Biblical scholar that wrote in the English language. A 
recent English work upon the Acts of the Apostles mentions Dr. Hackett's 
Commentary as the best work accessible to the English student. Dr. West- 
cott, the noted English writer upon the canon of the New Testament, said 
recently in a private letter, that he had discarded the English edition of the 
Bible Dictionary in order to replace it by Dr. Hackett's. In Germany, also. 
his works have been quoted and commended by scholars of the highest rank, 
and by many of these scholars Dr. Hackett was reckoned as a correspondent 
and friend. No man could hold a place like this, without influencing the 
Christian thought of the age, and by just so much as the progress of the 
church is dependent upon correct understanding of the Scriptures, by just 
so much must the work of our departed friend be regarded as having inti- 
mate connections with the general power of the universal church of Christ 
in this last generation of the history of the world. 

This is much to say of the life and work of a scholar whom the outside 
world knows almost nothing of. But it is the Christian estimate. It takes 
account of God's ordination of conspiring influences, and his weaving the 
thread of Ms servant's life into the life of the church and of the time. 
Providentially and by his own deliberate purpose he was fitted for his work. 
What were the characteristics of the teacher and the man, that gave him his 
place and his influence? I say the teacher and the man, — but the two were 
one and inseparable. Of few men can it be said, with equal truth, that all 
there was of faculty and energy, even to the uttermost fancy and feeling, 
was thrown into the work appointed him. With him there was no side-life, 
no dallying with minor interests. That face so grave, benignant, just — 
that form so proportioned, compact, true — showed, even in the most casual 
conversation, no signs of trifling. "One thing I do," seemed written out 
in the very intent composure of the man. He was buried in his work of 
studying and interpreting the word of God. And to many and many a stu- 
dent, that example of a high intellect, that bent itself with ever new avidity 
and delight to exploration of the treasures of the Bible, has given a new and 
inextinguishable sense of the infinite reaches and the priceless value of God's 
revelation. 

He might have had this singleness of aim without being the teacher that 
he was. But he added to this, certain teac-herly qualifications which must not 
be unspoken of to-day ; and. first of all, the discipline and the habit of ex- 
haustive investigation. Sometime a man must gain this, or he never makes 



A GREAT TEACHER OF GREEK EXEGESIS. 



333 



a scholar. And one of the great blessings of God to a student, is the 
Bight and contact of a teacher who presents in himself a model of absolute 
thoroughness ; who anatomises his subject — brain, skeleton, viscera and 
heart; who, like Sir William Hamilton, aims before writing to master every 
valuable word that has been written upon his theme since the world began ; 
who candidly recognizes every difficulty and weighs every objection ; who 
leaves no stone unturned, if he may find, perchance, some new illustration 
that will help to clear or impress what he conceives after long toil and in- 
quiry to be the truth. Such a man was the instructor whom we knew. He 
had drunk in Greek in his very early boyhood ; he had made it a living tongue 
to him by teaching its classics at Amherst and Providence, and by talking it 
with the boatmen of the Piraeus and the shop-keepers of Athens; the rhythm 
and grace of it had entered into his brain and blood. Travel had made the 
scenes of Scripture vivid realities to him; he could interpret the ninetieth 
Tsalm from his own experience in the solitudes of the desert, and the tri- 
umphal entry of Jesus, in Matthew, from his own surprise and exultation as 
he rounded the edge of Olivet, and caught the glorious view of Jerusalem, 
once the holy, now the profaned and desolate city. German, he learned in 
Germany itself; and the great works of the German critical scholarship, he 
daily used more constantly and naturally than English. But these were 
only the preparations for his work. Elaborate and comprehensive review of 
all the important literature bearing upon the subject under investigation, 
was followed by cautious, prolonged and original thought, and in this, the 
penetrating mind, the suspended judgment, the final, clear decision, showed 
him the master. 

This was the spirit which he strove to arouse with his pupils — the spirit 
of minute, critical, exhaustive Scripture study. Non mult a, sed multum. 
Not to go over all Scripture in a year, but to teach men what it was to study 
a few passages well; to convince them that every phrase had a meaning, 
definite and single — a meaning that could be accurately ascertained and 
clearly expressed according to fixed and settled laws of human speech ; above 
all, that every word of God had a meaning which was worth all the study 
that the best-trained mind could put upon it, — this was his one great lesson 
to successive companies of students for forty years. If this had been the 
book-wormish and exaggerated devotion of a life-time to trifles like the mark- 
ings of diatoms, it would have merited little praise. But it had its founda- 
tion and explanation in a reverent regard for divine revelation, that on the 
one hand would not brook a mystical importation of human fancies into the 
sacred text, and on the other hand would not permit the smallest Greek 
article or conjunction to be treated as an idle or ambiguous thing, in that 
word which ''holy men of old wrote, as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." 

Exegetical science has made steady progress since Dr. Hackett began to 
teach. The old mystical and homiletical method that prevailed in England 
fifty years ago, contemporaneously with the rationalistic methods of Ger- 
many, has given place to a more thoughtful and just inquiry into the actual 
meaning of Scripture. The grammatical and lexical method which succeeded, 
and the possibilities of which our departed friend so nobly illustrated, has 
itself been modified and broadened by Godet and Philippi, by Lightfoot 
and Perowne. We seem just about to enter upon a new era of Scripture 



334 A GREAT TEACHER OF GREEK EXEGESIS. 

comment, in which the word of God is to be interpreted not as a congeries 
of parts, but as an organic whole with a living unity. But historical and 
doctrinal interpretation, which Dr. Hackett conceived to belong not so much 
to his department as to that of theology, presupposes the grammatical and 
lexical, and would be impossible but for just such work as Dr. Ilackett did. 
How faithful to that work he was, may be inferred from the fact that, after 
forty years of teaching, he never went to his class without a new investiga- 
tion and revision of the lesson for the hour. 

One other most distinguishing characteristic of his, was his faculty of 
terse, vivid and eloquent exposition. He knew something of the heights 
and depths of the English language, and he never failed to use it, even in 
his unpremeditated talk, with a curious accuracy and a delicate sense of 
light and shade, that invested even the commonest subjects with a charm, 
and left in many hearers' minds the feeling of an un traversable chasm 
between his culture and their own, while it stimulated the discerning to net* 
care of their common speech. Yet this was at a world wide remoye from all 
pedantry or affectation. It was the limpid bubbling of a fountain of swvet 
waters, that all unconscious of itself must flow, and purely dow, if it flow at 
all. In his early days, he had drunk deep at those old 'wells of English 
undeflled," that are so nearly deserted now. His keen critical mind detected 
and rejected, with almost chemical alertness, both the vague and the rude 
in expression. He knew the value of time, and had learned the secret of 
style. He cultivated brevity and vigor of statement, in order to economize 
attention, and get the most that was possible into the written paragraph or 
into the passing hour. His questioning, in the class-room, was sharp and 
rapid, and perfectly unambiguous. And when he soared, as he often did, 
it was as if the prophetic fire of the sacred writer he expounded had flashed 
into his own breast, and he himself were caught up in spirit. It was no 
rhapsody or long drawn digression that he indulged in, but a powerful pic- 
turing of the scene or the circumstances or the thought or the emotion, of 
evangelist or apostle, in the composition of the very words under considera- 
tion. No man has lived, in America at least, who has been able so vividly 
to impress the most minute and recondite indication of the Greek original 
upon the minds of New Testament students. Again and again have his 
classes found themselves gazing at him with open mouths — lost themselves 
and he lost also — in intense contemplation of the truth wrapped up in some 
Greek particle and now for the first time unfolded before them. The piece 
of fire-works unlighted, and the piece of fire-works burning, are no more 
different, than Dr. Hackett in his quiet moods, and Dr. Hackett kindled 
and glowing in his exposition of the Scripture. 

During the war, it became his duty to give the parting address to the 
graduating class at Newton. They were going forth in a time of great needs 
and of great examples. In the silence of his study Dr. Hackett had followed 
our armies, and his whole soul was with the brave men struggling, wounded, 
dying, in the field. He urged the graduates to be men of like devotion to 
the cause of God. And, as he spoke, one of his raptures of eloquence came 
upon him, and the whole assembly were swept and bowed by his Intense 
and flaming appeals. A man possessed of such godlike faculty of speech, 
and using it every day for two score of years to awaken enthusiasm in the 



A GREAT TEACHER OF GREEK EXEGESIS. 335 

study of the original Scriptures, is a very gift of God to those who hear him. 
He has stimulated many an apathetic soul into thought, and though he 
would have called himself no orator, many and many a man has caught the 
spirit of true pulpit oratory from him. 

When I add to these two a last characteristic, I feel that it is the crown 
of all, — I mean his "modest stillness and humility." A natural shrinking 
from publicity, a constant consciousness of his imperfections, a childlike 
casting of himself at th« feet of Christ, his Savior — these were so marked 
that they prevented mo^t people from knowing him at all, while those who 
did know him knew him in these aspects best. His own low appreciation 
of his work led him to regard almost as pleasantry the praise that sometimes 
was lavished on him. At other times, his friends feared to intrude even their 
gratitude upon a mind that seemed so far from the thought of self. He was 
always ready to coufr ss ignorance. Sometimes he timidly confessed it. 
when he knew far more upon the subject in question, than the person who 
offered to inform him. With a peculiarly nervous temperament, that made 
him exceedingly sensitive to interruption, and an absorption of mind in his 
proper work, that left but little time to think of matters of common life, he 
was sometimes perplexed and ruffled, but he was just as sensitive to kind- 
ness, and there were times when he showed the very tenderness of a woman. 
How utterly devoid of ostentation or forth-putting or self-seeking he was ! 
With gifts that made him at times a very prince of talkers, it was only at 
intervals of years that he could be induced to speak in public. He prayed 
at our Chapel-service, and his pupils gained new views of sin, when they 
heard Dr. Hackett humbling himself and taking upon his lips the words of 
the publican: "God be merciful to me, the sinner." They gained new 
views of Christian service, when they heard him laying all his work as an 
unworthy offering at the feet of Him who died for us. Dear whitened head ! 
how many lessons it has taught us of unselfishness and humility. Thank 
God he knows now, that his labor and his life were "not in vain in the 
Lord." 

Only this last summer he visited his old haunts in Germany, and revived 
some of his cherished acquaintances of former days. He talked with Miiller 
and Tholuck. He brought back the scissors and the paper-weight last used 
by Meyer, and presented to him by his daughter-in-law. The companion- 
ship of an old friend made the journey delightful. He returned to his work 
possessed apparently of a new vitality and spirit. On the very morning that 
he died, he prayed in his family, that, if it were God's will, the members of 
it might be long spared to each other. But God's ways are not our ways. 
Three days ago he met his class in the lecture-room, but a sudden pain 
seized him, and he suspended the exercise. He walked to his home, and 
there, in his own bed, in a short half-hour, he breathed his life away, so 
softly, that those who stood by hardly knew when he was gone. It was 
dying without the long agony of sickness. Unconscious as he was, it was 
virtually an instant transportation from the world of anxious desire, and, 
at the best, of unsatisfied hopes, to the joy of his Lord, and the untroubled 
rest and inconceivable reward of the faithful. It was sudden death, but it 
was sudden glory. 

With the family toward whom he cherished so tender an affection, with 



336 A GREAT TEACHER OF GREEK EXEGESIS. 

the members of this Institution who so loved him, with the great companj 
of ministers and scholars throughout the land who revered him as a teacher 
and a father, there is mourning to-day. From the East many friends of 
olden time have sent their letters of condolence, and from the distant state 
of Indiana, the Convention of Baptists there assembled unite in a telegraphic 
expression of sympathy. We have few such men to lose. But let us not 
murmur, nor mourn as those who are without hope. God's purpose and 
wisdom are in this affliction, — his will be done ! God has blessed the earth 
with his life, — let us be thankful ! God will care for his family, and for the 
Institution to which he gave his last labors, — let us trust those infinite 
resources of power and grace that for a little time gave him to us ! Nothing 
In this world is too good to die ; earthly friends and teachers and leaders 
fall ; but the glorious gospel lives, and Christ lives, to put all things, even 
death itself, under his feet. Ah ! the revelation is better still, for Christ 
himself has said to us, "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth 
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and he that liveth and believ- 
eth in me shall never die." Let us not then talk of death, — it is life into 
which our beloved friend has entered. And since life to him meant work, I 
cannot think of him as enjoying or as praising only. That intent and stu- 
dious mind is surely busy somewhere. He did good work for God here, — 
but he will do better work for God there, as he uses his now ransomed 
powers perfectly and only for the glory of his Redeemer. And so we lay these 
palm-branches upon his coffin, with the floral cross and crown. They are 
poor and mute, yet true testimonies, of our unending affection and remem- 
brance. But they are more. They are symbols of the cross in which he 
trusted and of the joy to which the cross has led him, — the kingly diadem 
and the victor's palm ! 



XXXII. 
CHURCH HISTORY, AND ONE WHO TAUGHT IT/ 



In the earliest days of the church, there was one who, more than any other 
human teacher mentioned in sacred writ, had discovered the connection and 
meaning of the great events of Israelitish history. He had come to look 
upon the present as well as upon the past as having lasting significance only 
by virtue of it's relations to the divine-human person and work of Jesus 
Christ, and to the new spiritual life transfused from him into the veins of 
an exhausted and degenerate humanity, at the cost of the shedding of his 
blood. Only after Christ had come, was there possible a philosophy of 
history, and the first philosopher of history was Stephen. Yet the life of 
Stephen ended before it had well begun. His magnificent historical survey 
of the ages before Christ kindled the anger of that hostile Jewish tribunal ; 
by sudden and unexpected death, he was taken from the world while the 
work he seemed specially fitted to accomplish was just entered upon and 
only done as it were by fragment and sample ; this mournful record closes 
with words so vivid and affecting that the grief of eighteen centuries ago 
seems still to live and throb and break before us into convulsive weeping : 
"And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation 
over him." 

In memory of a teacher of Church History, of a true man and of a true 
Christian, we who were honored in being his colleagues and friends desire to 
utter a few simple words to-day, and so to testify and represent the common 
grief of this whole company of learned and devout men who carry him to 
his burial. Though it is forbidden me by the exigencies of the occasion, 
and the mention of his personal qualities has been assigned to another, I 
find it hard to forbear all reference to these, for he was the kindest and 
most gracious soul I ever knew. He was also a Christian man and a member 
of the Christian body, whose unsparing faithfulness and self-devotion left 
no heard call of duty unanswered. But this falls to his pastor to say. To 
me it is appointed simply to speak of him as regards the work to which he 
had deliberately chosen to devote his life, — the work of investigation and of 
instruction in church history. As preliminary and essential to a proper 
estimate of this, I shall speak with great brevity of his parentage, education 
and general preparation for his calling. I shall then describe his ideal of 
that calling, and the extent to which he realized it. 

Rabbi Joseph Wales Buckland was born at Deerfield, Oneida county, 
N. Y., on the 16th of December, 1829, so that his life covers a period of only 
forty-seven years. His father was a minister of the gospel of the Baptist 



* An Address at the Funeral of Professor R. J. W. Buckland, D. D., at 
the Second Baptist Church, Rochester, February 1, 1877. 
22 337 



338 CHURCH HISTORY, AND ONE WHO TAUGHT IT. 

denomination. His mother, like Hannah and Elizabeth of old, believed 
before his birtb that God was to give her a son who should serve him in the 
sacred ministry. During his infancy and early childhood this impression 
became conviction in the minds of both of the parents, and, in token of 
their faith in God and of their consecration of the child to this service, they 
changed the name, which originally was Smith, and had been given in 
remembrance of a young man who had studied for the ministry with the 
father but had met an early death, to Rabbi. That name, so nearly unheard 
of, was to be significant, as Hebrew names of old times were, and as modern 
names are not. It was to remind the boy as he grew — it was to remind the 
parents in their training of him — that he was to be a teacher for God. 
Never did name serve its purpose better than this one. Within this last 
year he has mentioned it as one of the influences of childhood and youth, 
that shaped his career in life. Although both parents carefully avoided 
speaking to him of the ministry until God had led him to choose it of his own 
accord, he considered his possession of this name as one of the providential 
circumstances which determined him to preach the gospel. 

Mr. Bucklaud's conversion was such as might have been expected in the 
case of one who was brought up under the peculiar religious influences 
which surrounded his early life. His mother was a woman superior in 
Christian devotion and attainments, so that I may say I have known but 
one other person at all comparable with her in this respect. The Bible was 
her constant theme, and Mr. Buckland has told me it was thought that more 
than one revival of religion in the churches where his father preached had 
been the result of her prayers and labors. So great was Mr. Buckland' s 
devotion to his mother that I believe he never omitted making what I called 
his yearly pilgrimage to the old homestead, so long as her life and that of 
his father was spared. During these visits, his mother would gather pas- 
sage after passage of the Scriptures, which she seemed to have hoarded 
up through the year, and ply him with questions as to the interpretation of 
them. Laughingly he would retort and call upon her for her own interpre- 
tation of these and other difficult passages, but so constant and so careful 
was her study of the Bible, that no minister of the gospel could have been 
more ready with an intelligent interpretation than she. His father's con- 
versations were very similar to those of his mother. The subjects I have 
mentioned were the all-absorbing ones in the case of each. From these 
facts one may well judge that there would naturally be nothing sudden or 
striking in the conversion of one brought up under the influence of such 
parents, so that Mr. Buckland said he could not date the particular time 
when he passed from darkness to light, but that it was a gradual change. 
I think his parents had never urged him to study for the ministry, and I 
think he was not aware, unless from inference, that his mother had had the 
impressions concerning him of which I have just spoken. 

At the age of seventeen, young Buckland entered the Sophomore class of 
Union College, and though among the youngest, if not the youngest of his 
class, he graduated at its head. After he had left college, he taught for more 
than a year in an institution for the blind in New York City. Even thus 
early he had formed a taste for natural science. Botany was one of the 
subjects he taught within the year or two that followed. He gave instruc 



CHURCH HISTORY, AND ONE WHO TAUGHT IT. 339 

tlon In certain noted female seminaries in the metropolis, and with such 
marked success, that subsequent propositions looking toward his acceptance 
of the position of President of one of the great colleges for women, were 
probably based in part upon the tradition of it. Through all these years of 
teaching and through all the years of his subsequent preaching, his taste 
for natural science grew. The microscope was his recreation ; natural 
history was his delight. He became an active member of several of the 
important scientific Societies of New York. 

There is an intimate connection and analogy between natural history and 
history properly so-called. Both give accounts of organic and living things. 
Growth and development are the essential principles of both. How it was 
that our friend was led to connect historical studies with his studies in 
natural history, we do not know. It is certain that the latter greatly assist- 
ed the former ; it may be that the one led to the other, as to a cognate field 
of inquiry. But there was another relationship of friendship and sympathy 
which must have had greater influence still. Young Buckland entered the 
congregation of Dr. William R. Williams, pastor of the Amity street church, 
— justly celebrated wherever the Baptist name is known as a princely 
preacher and as a man of wide historical erudition. The friendship of such 
a man, with the access he enjoyed to Dr. Williams's large private library, 
if it did not originate, did much to fix his taste for history and to guide 
his subsequent studies. Under the influence of Dr. Williams's preaching, 
he was converted. He was baptized, and was recommended to study for the 
ministry. He pursued a course of theology at Union Theological Seminary, 
graduating in 1855. He was ordained as pastor of the Olive Branch Baptist 
Church, on Madison Street, New York City. After a year of service in this 
first pastorate, he took charge of the church in Sing Sing. Here he spent 
seven years, from 1857 to 1SG4. He then returned to New York, and for five 
years was pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church on Twenty-third Street, 
one of the large and influential churches of the metropolis. Through all 
these thirteen years of ministerial labor, he showed himself the instructive 
preacher, the faithful pastor, the unfailing friend. Members of these 
churches have given me testimony within the few months past to the admi- 
ration and love with which they cherished the memory of his ministrations. 

But his studies and natural tastes fitted him better for teaching than for 
the work of the pastorate. History and science had gone hand in hand and 
had led him onw r ard. He had made original investigations into the history 
of our own denomination, or of bodies professing a similar faith to ours, for 
a considerable period before and after the time of the Reformation. He 
had been elected member of the Historical Society of New York. Certain 
lectures of his upon historical themes had attracted attention. The chair 
of History in this Seminary was vacant. None was thought so fit as he to 
fill it. He came to Rochester in 1S69, and began his work. To that work he 
gave himself with all the abandon and delight of a boy let loose in fragrant 
fields, after the hard tasks of school. Laboring always till midnight — often 
long after midnight — in exhausting preparation for the lecture of the coming 
day, and that, not for one week but for every week of the thirty-five included 
in the annual term of study, and adding to this the almost constant supply 
of some important pulpit of the city, he yet had such joy and excitement 



340 CHURCH HISTORY, AND ONE WHO TAUGHT IT. 

In his work that he seemed to gain strength rather than to lose. And this 
unremitting labor, never lightened by the declination of calls to work of 
other sorts that were constantly pressed upon him, he kepi up almost to the 
end. His even temperament and his iron constitution seemed equal to any 
strain. Few suspected that he could overdo. He was occasionally warned 
that no system could endure so constant taxing, but he confidently replied 
that he could work more hours in the day, and more days in the week, and 
more weeks in the year, than any man he ever knew. It was true, — but 
there is a limit to all human strength. Two years ago he broke, under the 
tension. Organic disease manifested itself, and though disease was never 
fought against with greater energy of will, disease has triumphed, and his 
work on earth is done. This leads me to speak of his ideal of the work of 
the teacher of Church History, and of the measure of his attainment. I do 
it, as one might estimate the height of a hill which he had never climbed. 
It is evident that no man can achieve high success as a teacher in any depart- 
ment, who has not a lofty sense of the dignity of his work and of his own 
personal vocation thereto. In this respect, Dr Buckland did not fall below 
the highest standard. To him Church History was not only a science and the 
most comprehensive of sciences — it was also the most important of all the 
sciences. He felt called of God to teach it. He was to continue, though 
uninspired, the history of the kingdom of God which an inspired Moses and 
an inspired Luke began. He felt that knowledge of the progress of this 
kingdom and of the conflicts through which it had passed, was essential to 
to the equipment of every competent preacher of the gospel. And he was 
set to give this knowledge to a portion of the rising ministry. He declined, 
in 1871, without a moment's hesitation, a call to the Presidency of Shurtleff 
College, and declined it upon the ground that the teaching of history was 
the one work and duty of his life. In his sickness, he could not be convinced 
that his work was done. He felt, through all the twenty-four months of his 
weakness and pain, that he was bound by the terms of his original calling to 
daily and hourly struggle with the powers that would terminate or curtail 
the great work to which he had devoted himself. 

It is indispensable that the true teacher have a lofty idea of the dignity 
and importance of his work. It is yet more essential that we have a correct 
idea of its nature. No man can teach history who conceives of it as a record 
of isolated facts. Unless he can see, in the epoch, in the nation, in the soci- 
ety, the product and expression of internal ideas and forces, which evolve 
themselves according to constituted law, he can understand neither society, 
nor nation, nor epoch. The life of states is a dynamic unfolding of a sub- 
stantive, though spiritual, principle inlaid in the character of their people. 
Until man is bound to his fellows by some such principle, so that together 
they can act as one body, he has no history, nor has he risen from savagery. 
Where there is any degree of civilization, there are no sudden movements, 
no changes without cause, no revolutions without age-long preparation. 
History is no rope of sand, but an organic whole ; and that which furnishes 
the chief connecting bond and the most powerful motive-force of history is 
the religious idea. Let me not go further, without assuring you that this 
view of the nature of history, with all its grand implications, is not simply 
mine — it was the guiding principle of Dr. Buckland's studies and teaching 



CHURCH HISTORY, AND ONE WHO TAUGHT IT. 341 

From notes of his own lectures, I have gained, since he died, a larger { 
conception than otherwise would have been possible of the breadth of his 
intended treatment of history. As he held the religious idea to be the chief 
force, so he held the theanthropic life of Christ to be the centre and pivot 
around which all history groups itself. "The whole career of mankind" — 
these are his words — " tbe whole career of mankind, considered in its relation 
to that theanthropic life, is sacred history ; the whole life of the world, 
treated without reference to that, is secular history." The history of the 
church is the history of tbe unfolding of this new divine life which, enter- 
ing the world in Christ, is ever communicating itself, not without conflict 
and temporary hindrance through human perversity, to ever-widening circles 
of humanity. Every phase and step of this history is to be examined and 
tested and judged, according as the church therein is faithful to the laws laid 
down in the New Testament for its development. I know of no sublimer 
conception of Church History than this. It is Neander's, with the test of 
subjective consciousness left out, and the test of Scripture alone retained. 
Such was his idea of his work, as to its importance and its nature. But 
conception is one thing, execution quite another. To execute a task like 
that to which he set himself, there goes the power of original and exhaustive 
investigation. Generalizations must be based upon wide induction of facts, 
and the gathering of these facts from languages ancient and modern, and 
from sources as common as the daily newspaper, and as recondite as the 
stray minutes of ecclesiastical bodies that met in obscure towns of England 
two hundred years ago, involves a linguistic training, an untiring industry, 
a generous comprehensiveness of spirit, a critical acumen in selecting and 
in rejecting material, which are rarely combined. Dr. Buckland had these, 
all in some degree, some in large degree. I have spoken of his industry. 
The comprehensiveness of his inquiries was as remarkable as his industry. 
Nothing was too great, nothing too small, that bore upon his theme. The 
life of Christ seemed to him to be the beginning of church history, as indeed 
it was, — he embraced that in his treatment. The heathen religions seemed 
to him a preparation for Christ, — he made them the subject of preliminary 
lectures. He wished to extend his course by embracing the history of Israel 
from the beginning to the coming of Christ. He brought down the history 
of the church to the present time. It is my judgment that as a whole, his 
treatment of the history of modern denominations was more thorough and 
exhaustive than that of any teacher of our day ; of certain of them he has 
given a fuller and better account than can be found in the works of their 
own writers. With his omnivorous avidity for facts, we used to say to him 
in pleasantry that he never would be satisfied till he had in his lectures 
carefully traced Church History back all the way from twelve o'clock to-day 
to the formation of the solar system according to the nebular hypothesis. 
And what he learned he remembered, whether it was matter of history, or 
of the natural science and civil law which he had looked into for purposes 
of recreation or illustration. An admiring friend, not given to random 
judgments, a member at once of the legal profession and of a club of gentle- 
men of scientific tastes to which Dr. Buckland belonged, said upon a certain 
occasion, that whatever subject might be treated by members of the club, 
whether it were politics, science, law, or religion, Dr. Buckland always 



342 CHURCH HISTORY, AND ONE WHO TAUGHT IT. 

seemed to know more about the subject than the man who had specially 
investigated it. There was perhaps something of designed hyperbole in 
the utterance, but it expresses in some degree the estimate formed by com- 
petent judges with regard to the extent and range of his learning. 

The proper execution of a historian's task requires a philosophical mind. 
I have said that Dr. Buckland set out at the very beginning of bis work 
with a correct idea of the nature of history. He gathered an immense mass 
of material of the most valuable kind. He felt that the organizing of this 
material, with the insight into principles that seizes upon salient facts and 
avoids superabundance of detail, was a work, not of days or months, but of 
long and laborious years. He had given his life to this work, — with physical 
vigor such as few possess, he expected a lifetime to do it in. His full set of 
written lectures would fill two thousand printed octavo pages. He had already 
done much in the way of condensing and systematizing this material. The 
syllabus of his lectures which he printed for the use of students, shows a 
consistent plan, a grasp of materials, a grouping and unifying mind, which 
gave high promise of what our friend might have done had God lengthened 
out his life. As it is, he had one thread running through all his lectures. 
No student who sat under his instruction will ever forget his idea of the 
church and of its development. His friends, in no small number, had 
looked upon him as the future writer of that history of the Church of Christ 
from a Baptist point of view, which has so long been a desideratum in our 
denomination, and which we might reasonably hope would be of value to 
Christians of other names. But a Providence wiser than ours has ordered 
that the work shall be left incomplete. Much is fragmentary, which unques- 
tionably would have been filled out and brought into vital relation to the 
rest, had time and strength served. He thought he could not die until 
that work was done. Ah, how small is our best work, and how unessential 
our life, to the purposes of him whose life-time is eternity and whose re- 
sources are infinite ! But God, we doubt not, took the will for the deed, and 
as for us — why, the torso is noble, though much is lacking to the perfect 
form. From what he has done, we may conjecture how much there would 
have been of true philosophy in his matured and finished work. 

There is a true sense in which his work is not yet done. Through the 
many students whom he had helped to train for the ministry, his life per- 
petuates itself. And this is the last and crucial test of an instructor in 
Church History; does he impress himself upon his classes? does he make 
true ideas of history a part of them forever? I think we cannot doubt that 
this was so with regard to Dr. Buckland. He had a natural ardor of mind 
and a gentle dignity, an unfailing flow of speech and a readiness to further 
in every possible way the inquiries of his pupils, which together made him 
impressive and popular, in spite of that severest trial of patience and atten- 
tion, the manual labor of long copying from dictation. The student loved 
the man and his work, — and it is the man, in large part, that makes the 
teacher. Subjects for public essays, where the student had his option, have 
been taken from Church History as frequently, if not more frequently, than 
from any other department of theological knowledge. He has left behind 
him no printed and published work, but he has written many "living 
epistles" that have gone forth, as we trust, to teach and to bless the church 



CHURCH HISTORY, AND ONE WHO TAUGHT IT. 343 

mid the world. And now that he has gone from us to pursue the themes he 
loved with a clearer Insight and a wider knowledge than that of earth, now 
that he watches the progress of the kingdom of God, not as one who is 
himself in the din and smoke of the battle, but from a point above the 
strife where the complicated movements of the combatants are seen in their 
true meaning and the chariots of God are discerned filling the mountains 
round about his people, shall we doubt in our loss and sorrow, that he who 
gave him to us will choose and point out one to take his mantle and complete 
his work? Let us pray God that out of the number of those he taught, 
there may be found one who shall accept the truth and be filled with a 
double portion of his spirit. When devout men carried Stephen to his 
burial, and made great lamentation over him, they little knew that Stephen's 
words had already gone to the heart of one named Saul, and that those 
words would never leave him, until Saul had become Paul, and the great 
teacher of the Gentiles had appeared to carry on the work which Stephen 
left so incomplete. But whatever may befall, this we know, that parting 
and death, disappointment and disaster, all changes and all times, all we do 
and all we leave undone, is made to further the historic progress and the 
ultimate triumph of the kingdom of our God. 



XXXIII. 

LEARNING IN THE PROFESSOR'S CHAIR. 



I have been asked to say a few words with regard to Dr. Hotchkiss as a 
teacher, and with regard to his former connection with the Rochester Theo- 
logical Seminary. I little thought twenty-five years ago when, as a student 
of the Institution, I first came under his instruction, that the day would ever 
come that I, as a representative of the Seminary, should officiate at his 
funeral. Even now the old associations come over me, and it seems unfit 
that I, the scholar, should speak of him the teacher. But there is a debt of 
gratitude I owe him, and though I can but poorly repay it by any spoken 
words, yet such as I have 1 gladly give, by way of tribute to an old 
instructor, whom each successive year has only taught me the more to 
revere and to love. 

1 I shall be obliged to say over again some things which the honored Presi- 
dent of the University has said before me, because what Dr. Hotchkiss was 
as a teacher grew out of what he was as a scholar, as a preacher, and as a 
man. Technical learning alone can never make a successful instructor of 
the young. There must be with it, and behind it, a certain mass of man- 
hood, or the learning will never win respect, much less communicate itself, 
as by contagion, to the pupils. There was much in the mental make-up of 
our friend, which qualified him for success in the professor's chair, and 
especially for success in his chosen department — the teaching of the Bible 
in the original languages. He was an ardent lover of the Bible, and a pro- 
found believer that its every line and syllable were written by holy men of 
old as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. In those days, we who were 
students wondered whether he did not press too strongly and exclusively 
the divine aspect of the doctrine of inspiration, and whether he made suffi- 
cient allowance for the human moulds into which the molten gold of truth 
has been poured. But it was a most valuable and never to be forgotten les- 
son which we learned from his intense and unflinching maintenance of the 
divinity of the Bible. To him each and every part of it was instinct with 
life. There was meaning enough in every word, to spend an hour upon. 
And every word had its practical value, because it was a part of the larger 
word of God. 

I think that all his learning grew out of this reverence for the Scriptures. 
His studies were not secular studies. He did not give himself to Syriac and 
Arabic merely because he loved them, but because he could make them helps 
to the interpretations of the Bible. He was an illustration of the intellectual 
stimulus and achievement which come directly and indirectly from the gos- 



* Remarks at the Funeral of the Rev. V. R. Hotchkiss, D. D., in the 
First Baptist Church. Rochester, January 7, 1882. 

344 



LEARNING IN THE PROFESSOR'S CHAIR. 345 

pel of Christ. He loved the old doctrines, and he held them in their old 
forms. The fall and total depravity of man, the substitutionary atonement 
of a divine Savior, the sovereign grace of God in regeneration, the eternal 
doom of those who reject Christ — these were to him indubitable truths, 
because the Bible taught them. And though his mind did not run pre- 
dominantly to Systematic Theology, yet a clearly conceived, and at times a 
sharply stated, theology gave coherence to all his thinking, and strength to 
all his utterances as a teacher. 

Because he recognized the Bible as the only infallible and sufficient source 
of truth with regard to God and heaven, sin and redemption, he set himself 
from the beginning of his ministry to draw water out of these wells of sal- 
vation. He knew that the well was deep, and so he availed himself of all 
grammatical, lexical and exegetical helps. He became a genuine man of 
learning. I doubt whether any man in the pastorate of any denomination 
in the land pursued a more continuous and thorough course of Biblical 
study than he. And in our own denomination, I can safely say that, though 
some may have surpassed him in their knowledge of history, of philosophy, 
or of theology proper, we have had no man in the pastorate who was a more 
profound student of the Scriptures. I do not speak simply of his knowl- 
edge of the Greek, of the Hebrew with its cognate languages, of oriental 
archaeology and customs, geography and history. I mean that knowledge 
which is the result of painstaking and minute investigation of every verse 
and chapter and book of the sacred record — such investigation as is neces- 
sary to correct and effective exposition of the Bible in public. 

In teaching his classes, therefore, he was always felt to be a full man. 
He would bring out meanings which we students had never imagined before, 
but the truth of which, when once suggested, was self-evidencing. Truly 
I can say, that the hours spent in his lecture-room were pleasant hours. Ho 
formed in us the habit of searching the Scriptures ; showed us what mines of 
unsuspected wealth were in them ; and withal taught us, after all our gram- 
matical and textual studies, how to take forth the precious from the vile, 
and to turn every real acquisition to practical use. In this respect I must 
speak of his Sabbath sermons, as an unintended but most helpful means of 
influence over his students. He had a rare way of gathering up the results 
of a week's study of a miracle or of a parable, of a connected passage of 
prophecy or of a penitential Psalm of David, into a compact, well-organized 
and intensely interesting expository discourse. I doubt Avhether this country 
has seen a better expository preacher than he was at his best. I remember 
going out from the meeting-house after his sermon on the Transfiguration, 
almost carried beyond myself by the variety of new knowledge, the grandeur 
of description, and the wealth of practical application he had given us from 
that well-worn narrative. Many an earnest effort to study the Scriptures 
with thoroughness, and many an attempt, however imperfect, to follow in 
his line of expository preaching, were, in my own case and in the case of 
others, the result of his example. 

He had doubtless his limitations. He was not — no man can be — equally 
conversant with all departments of knowledge. But Dr. Hotchkiss came as 
near knowing something about everything, and everything about something, 
as any man I have met. He was not preeminently a philosopher, — but he 



346 LEARNING IN THE PROFESSOR'S CHAIR. 

could talk with you about Kant and Hamilton. He was not mainly a student 
of the Fathers, — but he could give you new information about Hegesippus 
and Origen. He was not given to political economy, — but he could argue 
the question of protection and free trade. He was not a devotee of Early 
English, — but he had read Piers Plowman, and he kuew his Chaucer. He 
was not a recluse. He was a sagacious observer of current events. He was 
a companion almost unequalled in his power to instruct and entertain. 
Nervous of temperament, easily disturbed on account of this physical pecul- 
iarity, he was yet, with friends, one of the most genial of men. The Min- 
isters' Conference, of Buffalo, have given expression to their sense of 
bereavement, in the loss of one who was their wisest counselor, their most 
erudite scholar, and their most venerated and beloved friend. 

All these peculiarities made his instruction of his classes something 
unique. His quick, nervous manner, the readiness with which emotion 
would master the voice, the sharpness with which he would reprove captious 
questioning, the genuine devotion to the sacred text which shone through 
all his utterances — these first challenged attention, then attracted interest, 
finally won sympathy and confidence, till his classes came to be fellow- 
the children sitting at his feet to learn. For eleven years he did this work 
students with him, or rather, like a family group — he the father, and they 
in the Seminary, and, when it ceased in 1S65, scores of Baptist ministers 
were preaching, and have been preaching ever since, with something of the 
matter he had given them, and with something of the spirit they had caught 
from him. 

If there was anything he loved next to the Bible, it was the Bible-lands. 
I never can forget the ardor with which he would expatiate upon the scenes 
of Palestine and of the Desert. Twice he went to the East, and five times 
he traversed the Holy Land from end to end. To hear him tell about the 
red cliffs of Sinai, or about Jacob's well, where Jesus taught the woman of 
Samaria, or about Jerusalem, "beautiful for situation, on the sides of the 
north, the city of the great King," was almost to see the sights yourself. 
To see those sights he traveled, in the fall of the year, with a single Arab 
guide, under circumstances that involved no little hardship. But it was the 
delight of his life. And now that he is gone, I think with pleasure, and I 
know that his children and his friends will think with pleasure, that he has 
entered the gates of that city that hath foundations, the heavenly Jerusalem, 
and has become an inhabitant forever of that Holy Land of which the earthly 
is but the faint type and symbol, — 

" A land upon whose blissful shore 

There falls no shadow, rests no stain ; 
There those who meet shall part no more. 
And those long parted meet again." 

There the deep meanings of the book of God are opened to his illumined 
sight, and Christ speaks to him no more in parables, but shows him plainly 
of the Father. We do not need to pray for the repose of his soul, for the 
perfect peace of Christ is now his. He has served his generation by the 
will of God, and now he rests from his labors, and his works do follow him. 



XXXIV. 
THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT: 



It was the old story of a suppressed rebellion planting its last revengeful 
sting. Abner, the captain of Saul's host had been beaten in battle and had 
taken to flight. Three brothers from the army of Israel had pursued him. 
As Asahel, the fleetest of them, without armor, pressed upon him, Abner 
smote him with his spear. Asahel's very strength and swiftness and noble 
daring had brought him to his death. The enemies of David and of stable 
government gave the good cause a temporary check by striking down one 
of its most hopeful champions. It was no wonder that all the people that 
saw that bloody deed, or looked upon the mangled corpse of the brave 
soldier, were so moved with grief and indignation that they stood still. 

Twice, in like manner, this whole nation has stood still over the bodies of 
its chosen and beloved chief-magistrates, smitten in the hour of greatest 
fame and promise, and smitten by the hand of the assassin. Once when 
Abraham Lincoln, — the great civil war concluded, emancipation an accom- 
plished fact, the whole North full of gratitude and reverence for the sturdi- 
ness of that homely, humane trust in the people and in God that had led 
him safely through. — fell a martyr to liberty. How well I remember looking 
down from a window in Broadway upon that mighty funeral procession 
stretching up and down as far as the eye could reach, the muffled drums 
and the draperies of woe with which our great War-President was carried 
through the country to his tomb. But sadder yet, seemed to me the other 
night those mournful bells that waked us only to tell that the brave spirit 
of our last President had passed forever from the world. Lincoln's work 
seemed to have been accomplished. The whole land wept for him as for a 
benefactor. Garfield had just entered upon his term of service, and his 
work as President had just begun. As with Asahel in the Scripture narra- 
tive, a thousand hopes lie buried with him — hopes that held on in spite of 
disappointment, hopes fostered by the quiet courage of the long struggle 
against death, hopes based upon the new independence and influence which 
this very agony and trial would have given him. When I heard the tolling 
of those midnight bells, it seemed to me like a voice of God calling the 
nation to solemn thought and prayer. Now, if never before, we may hear 
what God the Lord will speak. Surely it becomes us, like the Israelites of 
old. in the presence of our dead, to stand still. 

First of all, we may stand still in appreciative remembrance of the life 



* A Sermon on the death of President Garfield, preached at the Central 
Presbyterian Church. Rochester, Sunday morning, September 25, 18S1, on 
the text, 2 Samuel 2: 23 — 'And it came to pass that as many as came to 
the place where Asahel fell down and died, stood still." 

347 



348 THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT. 

and character of the departed. President Garfield was a man of whom 
we have very many reasons as a people to be proud. He was a nol>i< 
example of what is almost distinctively American, the rise of native ability 
and energy from the lowest to the highest positions in the social scale. Left 
fatherless at an early age but under the tutelage of a mother of intrepid 
spirit, his hard work in the fields only developes a rugged constitution, his 
narrow opportunities for schooling rouse an eager thirst for knowledge, the 
bullying of larger boys stimulates a just assertion of his rights. He becomes 
conscious of power, first as a student, then as a teacher, finally as a puM it- 
speaker. He has a manly, healthy, sound spirit; and he makes his way t>y 
rapid strides through a college course, into active work as a professor, ami 
finally to the head of the institution where he got his first taste of a liberal 
training. He has convictions, and a manly way of propagating his opinions, 
that wins the hearts of his pupils. Without being ordained to the ministry 
of the gospel, he naturally drifts into preaching. He defends Christianity 
against spiritualism and infidelity. He advocates Free Soil doctrine in the 
contest with slavery. At twenty-eight, he is State Senator of Ohio. At 
thirty, he is Brigadier-General in the Army. Rosecrauz at first distrusts him. 
as a preacher who has gone into politics, just as Cameron afterwards 
declares that a broken-down preacher has no right to be nominated for the 
Presidency. But there is no break-down about the preacher, after all. 
Chickamauga makes him Major-General. Then he is needed in Congress, 
and to Congress he goes. There for eighteen years he holds a place second 
to none, for consistent and intelligent defense of sound principles in legisla- 
tion and in politics. As Chairman, first of the Committee on Military 
Affairs, then of the Committees on Banking and Currency and on Appro- 
priations, he presents to the House of Representatives and to the country 
as valuable a body of opinion on great questions of political economy and 
administration as has come from any statesman in our history except Alex- 
ander Hamilton and Daniel Webster. 

Many of those before me remember that most admirable address in which, 
three years ago, he advocated in our City Hall the endangered cause of a 
sound currency. That speech, so simple yet so powerful, so free from all 
appeals to prejudice, so full of calm and convincing reasoning, was enough 
to show to an enemy of our institutions the wonderful educating power of a 
political campaign under our system of government, and the certainty that 
with proper instruction the people could be trusted to decide aright. He 
had made the subject of finance his study for years, and one of his speeches 
in Congress begins: "Mr. Speaker. — I remember that on the monument of 
Queen Elizabeth, where her glories were recited and her honors summed 
up, among the last and the highest, recorded as the climax of her honors, 
was this, that she restored the money of her kingdom to its just value. 
And when this House shall have done its work — when it shall have brought 
back values to their proper standard, — it will deserve a monument." The 
House of Representatives and the nation combined did that very thing. 
James A. Garfield had much to do with setting that tide of public opinion 
that repressed corrupt silver legislation, that compelled a return to specie 
payments, and that branded as fraud all edging toward a repudiation of our 
public debt, — and for this, if for nothing else, he deserves a monument. 



THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT. 349 

From that influential position in Congress he was suddenly raised to the 
chief-magistracy of this great nation, and before time was given him for 
the full development of his policy, he has been now, as suddenly, taken 
from us. The purity of his private life, the warmth of his family affections, 
his love for wife and children and for the good old mother who tended and 
trained him when a boy, will stand side by side with George Washington's, 
as examples to a nation. The success which crowned a just ambition, the 
rising by right methods to the highest place of power, the scholarship and 
genuine mastery of public questions by which he achieved his honors, above 
all the high moral tone of his public life, will be an inspiration forever to 
American youth. I trust that to all this he joined the virtues of the true 
Christian. In his early days, and during the war, he knew what it was to 
pray. He was always faithful to his church in its outward observances. 
When the fatal shot struck him down, it was God's will to which he submit- 
ted himself, whether that will was life or death. The cares of office and the 
pressure of political life may have dulled his early religious feelings and 
made his devotions less earnest than once they were wont to be. I could 
have wished to hear from that sick-room plain recognitions of God's pres- 
ence, voices of prayer to him who could save him from death, utterances of 
trust in Christ alone, as his soul prepared to go forth alone into the great 
darkness. But though these things are withheld from us, we look to the 
total record of his life and feel that the spirit of it was Christian. We can 
more easily explain the unmurmuring fortitude of those weeks of suffering, 
if we assume that a stronger than human arm sustained him. And now 
that he is gone, we feel that death glorifies him ; we take fhe nobility and 
high purpose of his life, as we did in the case of Abraham Lincoln, as signs 
of an inner life that men could not see; we leave him reverently and hope- 
fully with God, trusting that he has entered upon rest and reward, and 
waiting for the revelations of that day when the secrets of all hearts shall 
be revealed. 

I call you now, in the second place, to stand still in grateful recogni- 
tion of the alleviating circumstances with which divine Providence has 
attended our sorrow. For, if we are Christians at all, we must recognize a 
divine Providence in all such events as these. Let us call it a permissive 
Providence, for none of us would hold that God by any act of his inspired 
the murderous intent or aimed the shot of the assassin. But what God does 
not work he may foresee and permit, while yet the acts of his creatures are 
free, guilty, and punishable. God does not always deem it best to prevent 
man's wickedness from pursuing its chosen course and so revealing its real 
nature. So there is no crime of man which God has not foreknown and 
provided for — not one that he has not arranged to control and overrule for 
good. God might have palsied the hand of Guiteau, but it was his plan 
rather to make that very wrath of man turn to his praise. God made the 
treachery of Judas the means of the world's redemption. And so, through- 
out human history, God makes human passion and wickedness, in spite of 
themselves, to bring about his purposes of good. His voice calls to us to- 
day: "Be still and know that I am God," and assures us that even these 
crimes and sorrows are among the "all things that work together for good." 

Will it impose too great a burden upon your faith if I go further, and say 



350 THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT. 

that we are bound also to believe tbat, in this sad event, over which a whole 
people are mourning, God has answered our prayers? This ought not to 
perplex us, but I know how often it does perplex us. I can see good from 
this calamity from the new lesson it is teaching us with regard to the true 
nature of answers to prayer. I fear there is an enthusiastic and unscriptural 
notion in many minds, the notion that a great desire for a specific blessing 
is proof that that blessing will certainly be granted us when we ask it of 
God. The Bible should have taught us better. Did not Christ our Lord 
pray: "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me" ? Yet his Father's will 
was that he should drink that cup. Were not all of Christ's prayers an- 
swered? Was not that very prayer answered? We get the secret of all in 
the last words of that same prayer: "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as 
thou wilt." So "Thy will be done" is the essence of all true prayer. When 
God sees it best for us to give just what we ask, he gives it; when he sees 
it best for us not to give, he gives, not what we ask, but what we ought to 
ask. In either case, prayer is answered ; blessing comes to us that never 
would have come, if prayer had not gone before ; the very prayers we offer 
are links arranged by God between his decree and its fulfilment. Prayer is 
answered, whether we receive what we expect or not; and let us be sure 
that blessing will come to this nation as the result of the multitudinous 
petitions that have risen before God's throne — blessing larger and better 
than we in our poor wisdom are able to conceive. 

Some blessings we can already see. Great sorrows like this make a whole 
people one. They educate our youth to patriotism. The solemnities of 
this day and of the morrow will cause a love of country and a sense of its 
greatness to thrill the soul of many a boy and girl that never felt it before. 
One of the earliest of my recollections is the draping of the church, and the 
memorial sermon, and the funeral procession, when William Henry Harrison 
died. I believe I have never ceased to feel the influence of that service. 
How much more deep and all-pervading is the grief of this hour ! The 
telegraph and the press have brought a whole nation to stand as watchers 
by one bedside, aye, have made a whole nation parts of one family. A bond 
of sympathy has been established that makes all classes one. Such things 
as these make a nation strong, teach it the dignity and worth of national 
life, prepare it to resist attack from without, nerve it to put down the evils 
that threaten from within. There may be dangers in our civil system with 
which our late President would have been too weak to grapple. His death 
may do more than his life, — it may rouse within this people an unappeas- 
able determination to bring them to an end. But this feeling is wider than 
the nation. It has overspread the world. There probably has never been 
a death — never an event of any kind — that has awakened such quick and 
world-wide sorrow. Methinks it is the prophecy of that coming day when 
the whole race of man shall become conscious of its organic unity ; when 
one impulse of love and loyalty shall pervade every human heart ; when all 
shall grieve and all rejoice together; when total humanity shall be like one 
great organ of many stops and keys, all vibrating to one grand harmony 
under the mighty constraining breath of the one Spirit of God. 

We have had time, too, to prepare us for this calamity. Had death 
Instantly followed the murderous shot, there would have been stirred far 



HIE DEATH OP THE PRESIDENT. 351 

more of partizan passion. It would have seemed almost the fruit of a con- 
spiracy. We know better now. No fear now disturbs us that our govern- 
ment is to become like that of Russia or of Turkey — a "despotism tempered 
by assassination." There is no nihilism abroad in the land. The deed is 
not significant of anarchy. When the bells sounded out on Monday night, 
no one's blood ran cold with the thought that revolution was to follow. 
Other lands, in other days, have not felt safe as we. How great God's gift 
to us, that the change from one ruler to another creates not the slightest jar 
in the great system! In language like that which Tacitus used of the Roman 
state, so we may say : Presidents are mortal, but the Republic is eternal. 
The very contemptuous silence with which the weak miscreant who did this 
dreadful deed has been regarded, shows, far better than words, how little 
significance belongs to him and to his individual purpose. With him let 
justice have her way. Let him be an example to all coming time of the 
abhorrence and the condemnation and the punishment that belong to the 
murderer of the head of a nation. And yet the greatest crime of human 
history was the murder of Christ, and Christ abhorred that crime as only 
one possessed of divine holiness could. And Christ prayed for his mur- 
derers. The penitent thief died by crucifixion, but the penitent thief was 
saved in answer to Christ's prayer. My friends, justice and pity are not 
incompatible. It is only the man who hates iniquity that can truly pray. 
He who most surely dooms the unrepentant transgressor to death can most 
truly love his soul. I am reminded of Mr. Finney's answer to the questiou 
what he would do if the only way to save a fugitive slave from being taken 
back to bondage was to shoot the master who was attempting to play the 
part of the kidnapper. "I would kill him," said Mr. Finney, — "but I would 
love him with all my heart." So we may hate the crime of Guiteau and 
with one voice demand that he be hanged between heaven and earth, but we 
may also, and at the same time, pray that God may have mercy on his soul. 

I trust this calamity will teach us also our dependence as a nation upon 
God. We have not prayed enough for our rulers. It is a pleasing part of 
the English Church service that there never fails a petition for the Queen, 
that God may endue her with his best gifts for the discharge of her high 
office, and may grant her in health and wealth long to live. Let us never 
forget our President. And then let us so reform our system of choosing 
Vice-Presidents that we shall practically answer our own prayers. To make 
the nomination for Vice-President a mere matter of conciliation to a defeated 
faction, in the hope that the result will be of no significance, is simply to 
tempt Providence, and to hazard the most important interests of the country. 
In almost every case where the Vice-President has succeeded to office since 
the adoption of our Constitution, the consequences have been a most sud- 
den and violent change of policy in the administration, an unsettling of 
public confidence in the stability of the government, and a rousing of polit- 
ical passions which have blocked the wheels of legislation. The inadvertent 
defects of our political system can be revealed only in such times as these. 
God may teach us our needs by this very trial. May we depend upon him 
and seek his wisdom. 

But all these thoughts only lead me on to what, in my judgment, is the 
great lesson of the hour. I would have you, therefore, in the third place, 



o52 THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT. 

stand still iu penitent contemplation of the special sin of this people which 
has been at least the indirect cause of President Garfield's death. When 1 
speak of a special wickedness among us which has virtually aimed the pistol 
that killed our President, I am not inconsistent with what I said a moment 
ago: I do not charge this crime upon any band of conscious conspirators. 
But there is an evil among us, a general tendency in our government, a 
method in our politics, which I brand as the guilty cause of this atrocious 
murder. That I may not seem to you to be dealing in mere figures of speech, 
let me quote you a sentence from General Garfield's speech in the House of 
Representatives on the day after the assassination of President Lincoln. 
"It was no one man," he said, "it was no one man that killed Abraham 
Lincoln ; it was the spirit of treason and slavery, inspired with despairing 
hate, that struck him down." As General Garfield then charged Lincoln's 
assassination to the system of slavery, so I now charge Garfield's own assas- 
sination to the spoils-system, which beginning with Aaron Burr, Andrew 
Jackson and Martin Van Buren, has degraded our whole political life into a 
selfish struggle for ofBce, and which proclaims as its motto the principle that 
to the victor in this struggle belong the spoils of the enemy. 

Years ago, in my first visit to England, I was hospitably entertained at the 
house of the Postmaster of Oxford. He was a dissenter of one of the straitest 
sects. He was personally obnoxious to the dignitaries of the University, 
and of the Church to whom Oxford is an earthly Paradise. He was a Liberal 
in politics, while the administration in power was Tory. Yet, in spite of 
these disadvantages, he held on in his office, and had held on through all 
changes of government for more than twenty years. How do I explain it? 
Simply in this way : He was a capable and faithful public officer ; he admin- 
istered the business of his office on economical business principles ; he knew 
his work as Postmaster better than any one else; and no government, Tory 
or Liberal, thought for a moment of removing him. Would the Oxford 
public have been better served, if every four years had witnessed a change; 
if each time some new incumbent had had to learn the trade ; if these suc- 
cessive Postmasters had been put there, not so much to secure the expedi- 
tious delivery of the mails, as to manage caucuses and to secure votes for 
the party ; if the tenure of office had been absolutely dependent on the 
retention of that party in power? 

And yet these last hypotheses represent the real state of our public ser- 
vice. Offices are distributed as tokens of private friendship or rewards of 
political service ; insecurity of tenure renders the administration of these 
trusts inefficient, and leads directly to efforts to make the most out of the 
positions while they last ; the absence of proper tests of character and com- 
petency permits the crowding of these places with men whose only merit is 
that they know how to manage the machine and keep the body of voters 
subservient to the will of a limited number of party managers. In the New 
York Custom House, where the government levies duties every year on mer- 
chandise worth a thousand millions of dollars, an office where long experi- 
ence, thorough compt tency and the most scrupulous honesty would seem to be 
most pressing needs. Collector Schell. in 1S58, removed 3S9 out of 690 offi- 
cials ; Collector Barney removed 525 out of 702; and in 1866 Collector 
Smythe removed 830 out of 903. Who can compute the distress of these 



THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT. 333 

officials at a change in the administration? For many of them change is 
ruin. They adopt corrupt methods to retain their positions, or they feather 
their nests before the time of change is upon them. The New York Custom 
House is but the type of some six thousand offices to which the United States 
Senate has the right of confirmation ; of 100,000 subordinates of all ranks 
and names, through whom the President executes the laws ; of 250,000 offi- 
cials, national, state and municipal, throughout the land. The interest which 
all these have in election is, not public interest, but selfish interest. This 
personal interest makes every political campaign a battle, not of reason or 
principle, not of intelligence or discussion, but a life and death fight for 
place, for perquisites, for subsistence, for spoils. Because everything is at 
stake for them, this vast body can organize, so that the few can govern the 
many ; men of character are driven out of politics ; democracy becomes a 
cheat and a lie ; and the lowest rule. The result is such inefficiency and 
extravagance, such dishonesty and defalcation, that it costs us three times as 
much proportionally to collect our revenue as it does in France, four times 
as much as it does in Germany, and five times as much as it does in England. 

The system of spoils has overwhelmed the Executive and his Cabinet. 
Three-quarters of the time of the President is consumed in listening to claims 
for office. Out of 720 calls upon a single Cabinet officer, 710 had to do with 
applications for place. In 1872, General Garfield, then in Congress, uttered 
these words: "For many years Presidents of the United States have been 
crying out in their agony to be relieved of the unconstitutional, crushing, 
irresistible pressure brought to bear upon them by the entire body of that 
party in the legislative department which elected them." By the so-called 
courtesy of the Senate, that body has usurped executive functions, while by 
working for office-seekers the House has made it well nigh impossible to 
devote proper time to the public business. It is a system that inspires every 
excitable voter with the belief that he too has a right to a share in the spoils 
of his party. It is a system that invites Guiteau to the Capital, and then 
maddens him by delays. It is a system that turns public office into public 
plunder, and that transforms the citizen's reverence for the Chief-magistrate 
into murderous hatred, and that wings the bullet to his heart as the swiftest 
means of bringing about a new deal. 

Into these last few moments I have condensed the substance of a most 
able and stirring article in the last Princeton Review by Dorman B. Eaton, 
Esq., of New York. But there is much more to be said, than has been said 
by Mr. Eaton. I have come here to-day to utter the whole truth as I believe 
it needs to be uttered. I must say to you that there can be no more impres- 
sive illustration of the all-encompassing grasp of this gigantic evil than the 
official history of our departed Chief-magistrate. With a Congressional 
record that was unimpeachable behind him, with many an utterance in 
which he had pointed out the need of reform and had marked out the path 
to be followed, General Garfield hardly found himself the nominee of the 
Republican Party, before he felt the need of conciliating that powerful 
machine which by its opposition or its indifference might frustrate his elec- 
tion. The result was a letter of acceptance in which ambiguities took the 
place of clear statement, and the concession was made that Members of Con- 
gress have a right to be heard with regard to the appointments in their 
23 



854 THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT. 

districts. He entered upon his high office, and we have now to mourn that 
the vast majority of the time he had to give to his country was given, under 
compulsion, to listening to the vast horde of office-seekers, who besieged 
him at the White House and urged their claims to a share in the distribution 
of the spoils. With a still lingering notion that official place might properly 
be made a reward for private or party service, he was led, in violation of his 
own expressed principle that no public servant should be removed before 
the expiration of his term, except for malfeasance in office, to transfer the 
Collector of the Port of New York to a position of lower rank and to put in 
his place one whose chief claim was that he had been a strong opponent of 
another wing of the party and an influential advocate of his own nomination. 
I do not believe that these inconsistencies indicated the set purpose and 
temper of his mind. I trust that, had he lived, he would have risen superior 
to the malign influences that were about him, and that a healthy moral 
nature would have overcome this worse than malarious poison that infects 
our political atmosphere. Still we must be true to facts and to God. With 
what we may acknowledge to be good intents and plans for the future, even 
President Garfield allowed himself to take wrong steps at the beginning of 
his presidential career — steps which it would have cost many political 
friendships and much of moral courage to retrace. 

I recognize in general the principle, "nil de mortuis nisi lonum." But 
the crisis upon us Is too terrible to permit a public teacher to mince his 
words. An apotheosis of President Garfield is not the best service to his 
memory, nor to the country which he loved and sought to serve. It will 
not detract from our sorrow, to acknowledge that he was human and that he 
erred. W« need to acknowledge the fact, because only in the light of it can 
we see how deeply-rooted is the evil we are called to combat. It Is with 
Presidents as it with Popes. Before their accession, they are not uncom- 
monly reformers. Once in office, they find themselves not so much engineers 
as passengers, on a moving train whose direction and momentum apparently 
require more than mortal energy to change. They find that there is a 
machine; that well nigh all their advisers and associates belong to it; that 
its instinctive and almost resistless movement is in traditional directions and 
after traditional methods. Presidents and Popes were intended to lead, — 
but alas, it is so much easier to follow ! They are like Laocoon and his sons 
in the folds of the serpents, — they writhe, but they succumb. This is what 
every President has done thus far — even President Hayes. All have more 
or less recognized and yielded to the doctrine that positions of trust under 
government may properly be made the means of controlling a party, of 
propitiating enemies, of rewarding friends. 

I deem it time to say these things, because the American people will never 
listen if they will not listen now. If this time passes by and the warning 
voice is unheard, it may take years of yet deeper corruption and of more 
selfish partizanship, to open the eyes of the nation. For it is the nation — ■ 
it is we ourselves — who are at fault. The trouble with both President Hayes 
and President Garfield was, not that they had not sound convictions, but that 
they feared the people were not sufficiently in earnest to support them. 
How sad now seems the end of our President's career ! Killed by the very 
spirit which he was willing to some extent to conciliate ! The bullet of 



THE DEATH OP THE PRESIDENT. 355 

Guiteau was not the work of a few politicians disappointed in their greedy 
clamor for place, — bat it was indirectly the result of a system which we all 
have fostered, when we ought to have lifted up our voices and our hands 
against it. Well was it said, a short time ago, that the American people has 
as yet but a superficial interest in the reform of our civil service. We have 
not done our duty in protesting against this prostitution of our public serv- 
ice to the base uses of a horde of machine politicians. Guiteau, with his 
passionate clamor to be fed out of the public crib, is but the type of a spirit 
that has been all-pervasive among us — the spirit that would use the public 
service for private gain, — and therefore for that bullet of Guiteau we our- 
selves are more or less responsible, and for it ought to repent before 
Almighty God. 

We hoped for future public utterances and acts on the part of our dead 
President which would show his heart still right on this great subject, and 
which would lead the way to the complete wiping-out of the accursed evil. 
And the worst forebodings which many of us have had with regard to the 
incoming administration have arisen from the fact that the new President 
has hitherto seemed, not from compulsion but from choice, to adopt the 
aims and to use the methods of the stock politician. Did ever any ruler of 
men so need the prayers of the good as Chester A. Arthur does to-day? 
We have tried to hope that these last months may have taught him wisdom ; 
may have led him to see that there were certain moral. forces at work in this 
nation whose existence he had not counted on before ; may have led him 
to look with incipient distrust upon the counselors whom he has hitherto 
followed. But in estimating the probabilities of the future, I have been 
unable to forget that President Arthur owes his political being to a stronger 
man than he — a man who is the very representative and embodiment of the 
system we abhor. By all rules of political honor, or rather dishonor, he is 
bound to exalt his creator. — and his creator is Roscoe Conkling. As Vice- 
President of the United States he soiled his great office by lobbying at Al- 
bany for his chief, when the chief was squabbling for the Senatorship he had 
thrown away. Let the President now appoint Mr. Conkling his Secretary 
of State, let the broken machine be rehabilitated, let all the arts that both 
know so well how to use be employed to strengthen and consolidate it, let 
the offices be packed with men pledged to advance its interests, let news- 
papers and politicians and people who prefer the semblance of power and 
success to principle and the public good, all join in hallelujahs to the ability, 
the force, and the thoroughly American character of the new administration, 
and we shall see a perpetuation of this spoils-system and a further lease of 
power given to its defenders and advocates such as will bind an honest but 
too submissive nation in chains for another twenty years. 

Nowhere, except in the Arabian Nights, where the barber becomes Grand 
Vizier, do I remember so sudden, unmerited, and dizzying an elevation as 
that by which the former Collector of the Port of New York has first become 
Vice-President, and then President of the United States. If President 
Arthur has only been taught wisdom by the outburst of public feeling that 
followed the shot of the "assassin ; if he will only cut himself loose from 
association with the set of professional politicians whose methods have 
roused such abhorrence among thinking and patriotic men ; if he will only 



85fl THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT. 

remember that it is for no goodness that there is in him that he has been put 
in this place of responsibility and power, and that respect for his adminis- 
tration will be wholly dependent upon his good behavior, he may yet furnish 
reason to think that the death of President Garfield was not an unrelieved 
calamity. But if Providence has otherwise ordered, and it is our lot to 
have the spoils-system in its worst features revived; to see wholesale 
changes in our public offices for the mere sake of perpetuating the power 
of a few and of rewarding personal services at the polls ; to experience i 
still further degradation of our civil service in the line of inflaming party 
passion, of making our elections mere squabbles for spoils, of turning our 
legislatures into mere assemblies for the ratification of the decrees of the 
managers of the machine, — still we will not despair of the Republic, but will 
believe it simply the will of Providence that the evil should grow ripe before 
its fall, that its monstrosity should become so hateful as to rouse universal 
opposition, that like slavery it should meet its doom in the very act of sub- 
jugating all things to its sway. The accession of President Arthur should 
be the signal, not for blind acquiescence in the inevitable, if that inevitable 
be the extension and deepening of corruption in our politics, — it should be 
the signal for united determination on the part of all Christians and all 
patriots, all thinking and good men of whatever party or name, that our 
ciyil service shall be reformed, and that the accursed system of spoils shall 
be done away forever from our politics. 

I am not unmindful that every incoming Executive is entitled to the sup- 
port and confidence of the nation until he has proved himself unworthy. 
That confidence and support we should render him on his entrance upon 
his duties, and just so long as he remains faithful to his trust. May God 
enlighten and keep him ! May God lift him above low partizanship, and 
enable him to live for his country and for the future ! There are many 
things to encourage the hope that he will do so. He is the son of Christian 
parents. His father was a Baptist minister. He has at least the ordinary 
respect for religion and for morality. His private life is above reproach. 
The letter in which he accepted the nomination for the Vice-Presidency, 
and the brief address which accompanied the final taking of the oath of 
office as President, will compare favorably with the utterances of General 
Garfield under similar circumstances. Above all, his modest and serious 
bearing during the weeks of suspense that have intervened between the 
shot of the assassin and the death of the* late President, have drawn to him 
a popular sympathy and have awakened a general hopefulness which will 
prove most valuable helps in the adoption and carrying out of a truly states- 
manlike policy. The country waits with patience and with good will to 
second and further every step in the direction of wise administration. If 
he shall devote himself to the reform of abuses, if he shall choose men of 
principle for his advisers, if he shall conduct the government upon business 
methods, if he shall scorn to be the servant of a selfish clique, if he shall 
rise to the dignity of a true President, then every Christian and every honest 
man will applaud him and award him a lofty place among the great men of 
history. We pray most devoutly that he may know and seize his opportu- 
nity. But if, with all these motives and influences to favor a right course, 
he shall pursue the wrong; if he shall put himself under the control of an 



THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT. 357 

unscrupulous faction ; if he shall set himself to turn back the current that 
has been running more and more strongly toward reform in our civil service ; 
if he shall use the vast patronage of his office to raise up a new army of 
place-holders devoted to his personal interests and bent upon the consolida- 
tion and perpetuation of their ill-used power, — then we utter to him a 
voice of warning ; we assure him of indignation and wrath, tribulation and 
anguish ; of implacable hostility on the part of the intelligence and virtue of 
the land ; of opposition to bis administration shown by all legal and consti- 
tutional moans; of political ruin to himself and to his party; of everlasting 
fame as a betrayer of his country. Like the king of Babylon, he stands at 
the parting of the way. Two roads diverge from the spot which his feet 
now tread. May God save him from choosing the wrong course ! May God 
give him grace to choose the right ! 

So let us all stand still, in appreciative remembrance of the life and char- 
acter of the departed ; in grateful recognition of the alleviating circum- 
stances with which divine Providence has attended our sorrow; in penitent 
contemplation of the special sin of this people which has been the indirect 
cause of President Garfield's death. I suppose that if all those soldiers 
of Israel stood still, and looked at the dead body of Asahel, then each one 
individually must have stood still. Have we done this to-day? Have I 
individually — have you, each of you and singly — stood still, in reverence, in 
gratitude, in penitence? Ah, these general reflections will be of little use, 
unless we make them personal to ourselves. Let us hear what God the 
Lord will speak to us. The life and character of General Garfield were 
gifts of God to you and me ; you and I need to render thanks for many 
mercies which accompany this cup of sorrow ; above all, you and I need to 
humble ourselves for our sins, and to address ourselves to the duty of the 
hour. There is a mighty feeling abroad in the land — a feeling strong 
enough and deep enough, if only organized into practical action, to remove 
from us the transgressions which have provoked God's anger and have 
endangered the safety of the nation. God will be with us, if we are but 
true to him. If we will only stand still, in fixed resolve to return to 
God and to the old paths of honesty and truth, we may also stand still and 
see the salvation of God,— and, as for those enemies of our peace, we shall 
see them no more again forever. 



XXXV. 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING/ 



The ancient world was full of unconscious prophecies of Christ. Long 
before the ''Desire of all nations" had come, philosophy was waiting to lay 
her unsolved problems before the mighty Prophet, and the polytheistic relig- 
ions were seeking for the Priest who could give atoning efficacy to their 
sacrifices. And not less was it true that all the political systems of the earth, 
confessing their own poverty and imperfection, were standing in silent expec- 
tation of his advent who was King by right divine. All kingdoms that 
preceded his, were in some sort types and prefigurations of the coming 
kingdom of God. The very end for which the Jewish kingdom existed 
under David and Solomon, was to fix in the mind of a select people the idea 
of a monarchy grander far in unity, strength and splendor. And the vast 
world-empires of Chalda3a, Greece and Rome, were they of no use or value 
to the humanity that bore their heavy burdens? Let us not so deny the 
providential ordering of history. These were but the vain attempts of human 
nature to anticipate God's great plan of universal domiuion — attempts per- 
mitted by God to prepare mankind for the kingdom of his Son. Yes, all 
the self-deifying schemes of world-wide conquest which Nebuchadnezzar, 
Alexander and Augustus ever formed were but dim prefigurations of the 
coming reign of Christ. These men were but the representatives of univer- 
sal longings and aspirations. Rome would never have grasped at the empire 
of the world, had there not been an answering instinct of monarchy in the 
world's great heart, — her name among the nations and her gigantic sway 
rested upon that deep principle of human nature which moves the race to 
seek blindly for the restoration of its primal unity, — her magic influence over 
all lands and the terror of her imperial decrees would never have been pos- 
sible, had she not been the specious counterfeit of another world-wide king- 
dom of spiritual influences and of living dependence upon an invisible head. 
Rome was not herself the kingdom for which the nations longed. She was 
rather the great dragon of the Revelation, seeking to devour the feeble child 
who was the true hope of the world. But though the dragon's material 
supremacy was represented by the seven crowns upon its seven heads, and 
its control over the world's spiritual lights and rulers by the third part of 
the stars of heaven which were carried off by the sweep of its tail, yet this 
feeble child, seemingly so easy a prey, was to escape its jaws and, nourished 
secretly by God, was at length to rule the nations with a rod of iron — so to 
rule as to break their hostility and to bring them into willing subjection to 
its government and laws. The coming of Christ has antiquated the notion 



* A Sermon before the Judson Society of Missionary Inquiry, Brown Uni- 
versity, Providence, R. I., August 31, 1869. 

858 



THE KINGDOM OP GOD AND ITS COMING. 359 

of any universal monarchy except his own. It is already dimly seen that 
the sublime ambition of reducing the whole earth under one head, and fusing 
its heterogeneous populations into one great empire, is hopeless of accom- 
plishment except by the hands of him who adds to all human perfections 
the power and wisdom of a God. 

The Psalms, in their language of magnificent metaphor, speak of the 
governments of the world as the ''great mountains," and of warlike, oppres- 
sive, robbing states as "mountains of prey," — and who would deny that the 
ancient mountains that lift their white heads above the clouds and plant 
their feet at the centre of the earth, watching in moveless majesty the 
dawning and death of the centuries, are apt emblems of those dynasties that 
have ruled the race for ages? But when the prophetic Scriptures would 
describe the kingdom of Christ, the figure is immeasurably expanded and 
exalted. That kingdom is a mountain also, but a mountain that grows from 
the smallest beginnings to an inconceivable greatness. First a stone cut out 
of the hillside without any agency of man and by the invisible hand of God, 
it rolls onward, increasing as it goes, until it crushes into dust the images 
men have built to take its place, and becomes a great mountain that not only 
overtops and swallows up every mountain of the world, but fills at last the 
whole circuit of the earth. In such grand symbolic language does inspiration 
set forth to us the truth that Christ shall reign until all enemies shall be 
put beneath his feet, all humanity shall be united in him as its head, and 
his universal monarchy shall embrace earth as well as heaven. 

I address this evening a society of young men whose organization derives 
dignity and worth from its connection with this kingdom of God. It seeks 
by inquiry into the condition of the world, and the forces which God has 
prepared to subdue it, to determine the truest direction and methods of 
coming efforts for the advancement of Christ's cause. These early days of 
preparation for the work of life may well be spent in such inquiry, and the 
name that is emblazoned on your banner, the name of the greatest modern 
missionary laborer, may well serve for your example and inspiration. I 
bring to you, therefore, to stimulate your search for truth and point to you 
the way of duty, this prayer and promise of Christ. There is no sentence 
in the book of inspiration which more clearly expresses the ultimate aim of 
God, and thus the great end of life for us. It constitutes the dominant 
thought of the Lord's prayer — the thought indeed that meets us at the very 
threshold of it. When he who was the type and model of humanity left a 
type and model for men's prayers, he began, not with the expression of hu- 
man wants, but with petitions for God's glory, — not first, "give us this day 
our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses, lead us not into temptation," — 
but "hallowed be thy name, — thy kingdom come!" And this because the 
moment that prayer "thy kingdom come" is answered, the satisfaction of 
all human wants is sure. We cannot then in any way so enlarge our hearts 
or prepare us for our coming work as by contemplating this one petition 
into which all our human prayers, so far as they avail anything, may be 
resolved. May this contemplation help us to see with greater clearness the 
magnificence of God's kingdom, and, so seeing, to pray and labor with 
stronger heart that earth may be reconciled to heaven, and that both may b» 
made the perfect instrument of God's sovereignty and revelation. 



3G0 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING. 

First, then, we ask "what is this kingdom?" and the most obvious reply 
is that the kingdom of God is a kingdom in the soul. You cannot mark 
out on any map its geographical limits. You cannot bound it by mountain 
ranges, or measure it by the length of continents. It has nothing to do with 
any of the natural divisions of the earth, for it is a spiritual not an earthly 
kingdom, and all lands are to come within its boundaries at last only because 
all the souls of men are to be subject to its dominion. When Nicodemus 
imagines it confined to a chosen land or people, he must learn that neither 
one's physical dwelling-place nor connection with any nation makes one 
partaker of its rights and privileges. "The kingdom of God is within you," 
says Jesus, and no protracted pilgrimages nor outward professions nor 
priestly manipulations will bring us into it. It is a kingdom of spirits, 
whose King is a Spirit, ruling not by deputies but directly by his spiritual 
presence in the hearts, of his subjects. In earthly kingdoms, the rule is 
external, by written laws, by subordinate authorities. The King cannot be 
everywhere at once — he must delegate his power. But God is everywhere, 
and needs no representative or viceroy. The Holy Spirit, whose indwelling 
iu the soul is the evidence of our naturalization in this kingdom, is no simple 
divine influence apart from God, but is the very presence of the King him- 
self. This is the greatness of human nature, that the high and lofty One 
who inhabiteth eternity will make the soul of man his palace and his temple. 

Of this reign of God in the soul and his constant working and revelation 
there, all the methods of his rule and operation in nature are but echoes and 
symbols. There is a concurrence of God needful to support my physical 
organism in every breath I draw, whether I sleep or wake. The Hebrew 
prophets were far nearer the truth than our rationalizing philosphers, when 
they heard God's voice in the thunder and saw his beauty in the cloud-lit 
skies. Not only in the wrathful moods of nature, when fire and earthquake 
speed forth on errands of justice, but in the broad sweep of productive 
agencies which furnish food to the sower and bread to the eater, God is 
present — no passive spectator, but working hitherto and forever, the motive 
power of all that moves, the life af all that lives. But all this indwelling 
and co-working of God in nature is only the rough picture-card by which he 
teaches us who are children, how great and blessed a thing is his indwelling 
and co-working in the soul. The earthly bread by which he sustains us is 
but a faint symbol of the true Bread that came down from heaven to nour- 
ish and feed our souls. The earthly vine to which he gives life that it may 
keep alive its branches is but the faint symbol of that true original arche- 
typal Vine which has its roots in heaven, not on earth, and to which all the 
scattered, half-withered branches of humanity are to be reunited that they 
may again have life divine. 

And here is God's true reign and kingdom, not in nature. In nature he 
has never ceased to reign, — his life sustains even the bodies of those who 
sin against him. But he has humbled himself to give man an independent 
will, by which he may cut his soul loose from God's spiritual rule, though 
he never can break the bond of physical dependence. This kingdom in the 
souls of earth's revolted millions God would restore, and it is this kingdom 
which we pray may come. It is little for God to rule in nature, so long as 
he rules not in the heart. For the soul of man is greater and grander, when 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING. 361 

judged by the standards of eternity, than all the physical universe beside. 
Only spiritual existence is of everlasting significance; the soul shall live, 
when the stars shall fade and die. Nature is unchanging — and she has na 
capacity for growth ; but man has powers capable of indefinite expansion ; 
his is the fearful heritage of an endless progress towards good or ill. All 
our figurative representations of the breadth of his nature, and the variety 
of his endowments, only mock the reality. There are continents within 
him which no Columbus has ever yet discovered, and heights of capacity 
which the eagle's eye hath not seen. He has a will which is the strongest 
thing in the universe next to God — a will which measures its strength too 
often by resisting God and resisting him forever. A whole heaven, a whole 
hell, may be found within the compass of that single soul. And the majesty 
of God, when throned and templed in that single soul, is greater than when 
he sits upon the circle of the heavens and all the shining orbs of his material 
creation Aveave their mazy dance beneath his feet. 

But if the kingdom of God be ever set up in this soul of man, it must 
be a kingdom of grace and not a kingdom of force. Once gain a proper 
conception of it as a spiritual kingdom, and from that moment you perceive 
that it is its essential glory to exclude all thought of compulsory obedience. 
It is not so with earthly governments, even though they be the best. How 
often has the monarch's rule been little else than the sway of a malig- 
nant might like that of Satan ! During the reign of the last king of Naples, 
the stranger in his capital observed that the fortress which juts out into that 
beautiful bay to protect the city from the attack of a foreign fleet, instead 
of pointing its guns toward the sea, had turned them all inward upon the 
town. It was easy for him to mark the scowl of hatred that crossed the 
faces of the people as their eyes fell upon those cannon, so admirably 
planted to sweep with grape and canister the principal streets of the city, 
and if need be, to batter down the houses of rich and poor alike with a rain 
of shot and shell. The silent mouths of those great guns uttered a continual 
menace — they spoke no language but that of threats, and it was no wonder 
that the people, when their time had come, rose like Samson, broke the 
green withes with which tyranny had bound them, and flung them to the 
winds forever. 

The world imagines that God's government maintains its supremacy by main 
force in like manner, and that his law, like Neapolitan cannon, utters only 
the language of threatening and wrath. But this is man's slander and de- 
traction of God's kingdom, — it is not a kingdom of power and justice merely, 
— the very art and wisdom of God consist in demonstrating to blinded hearts 
that it is a kingdom of pure and infinite grace. In what wondrous ways 
does God conduct this demonstration ! Could human imagination ever have 
dreamed in its wildest flights that the "eternal Sovereign, the incorruptible, 
invisible, only God," would become man, accept the limitations of human 
nature, make humanity a part of himself forever, in order that a race that 
maligned his government and character might understand him, and thus be 
led to love him? Yet this is the very thing which God has done. The King 
of kings has come down from his place of power, has become one of this 
same sinning, suffering race, has known in his own body what the pains and 
trials and temptations of human nature are, has proved, by personal contact 



SG2 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING. 

with the sinners and by endless ministries of love, how great is his syinpatny 
with their needs, and then, feeling their depravity and hatred as none but 
he who was holiness and love could feel them, has yet put himself in 
their place of guilt and shame, has borne the dreadful chastisement due to 
their offences, has paid their debts by pouring out his blood, and then haa 
lain a mangled corpse in the very grave where all mankind were doomed to 
hopeless burial. And now this brother-man, having conquered death for 
us, and having risen for our redemption, with a brother's sympathizing 
heart, and more than a brother's claims to love, sits upon the throne of the 
universe, all power in heaven and earth being given into his hand. Oh, who 
can mistake God any longer? As we gaze upon our crowned and sceptered 
Savior, with the human tears scarce dry upon his cheeks and the brother's 
compassion still beaming from his eye, we see that God is not a God of 
power and justice only, but a God of infinite self-sacrifice. For let us never 
forget that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, — it is only 
in Christ that we can see or know the Father. We have no other God and 
no other King but him whose character and government are revealed in the 
God-man, Christ Jesus. 

So the King became man, — but there is a greater wonder still — he became 
man that men might become kings. God took to himself human nature, 
that human nature might be reunited to God. Ah, we have failed to see 
the grandeur of the divine kingdom, if we have not perceived that it consists 
in an actual union with the life of God in Jesus Christ. The submission 
which it seeks is not the submission which degrades. Its law is the law of 
liberty and love, written on the heart by Christ the King. It is a kingdom 
of free spirits, whose freedom is assured and exalted by partaking of the 
divine nature, and by receiving evermore the currents of the divine life to 
nourish and sustain their own. More intimate and indissoluble than the 
union of husband and wife, or of the stock and branches of the vine, is the 
union of our souls with Christ. We are in Christ as the very element in 
which we live and move and have our being, and Christ is in us the very 
spring of all our life and activity. The truth of which Pantheism is but the 
blind and unhallowed perversion — the truth that God is all and in all — is not 
only the very foundation of the Christian scheme, but in Christianity Is first 
made a matter of living experience and consciousness. 

The very central truth of all theology, and of all religion, is the union 
of the believer with God in Jesus Christ — not the union that destroys or 
confounds, but the union that preserves and glorifies the personality of 
God and the personality of the human soul. By this union, the subject of 
the divine kingdom comes to participate in the character and blessedness 
of God, — for God's righteousness, peace and joy are his. By this union 
he comes to participate in the divine glory. Even here he is a citizen of 
heaven, a son of God, on whose brow the angels see glittering a crown of im- 
mortality. And what earthly eye hath seen, or what earthly tongue can tell, 
the future majesty and greatness of those to whom it Is the Father's good 
pleasure to give the kingdom? They are to sit with Christ upon his throne 
—they are to judge angels — they are to be kings and priests unto God. 
They are to shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. They are to 
have spiritual organisms like that glorified body of Christ which John saw 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING. 363 

on the Isle of Patmos. Having given up all to Christ, they are to receive 
all things from him. Having lifted up the gates of the soul to welcome the 
universal Sovereign to supreme dominion, they are to find themselves kings 
in his kingdom. In the Apocalypse, there is a vision of a woman clothed 
with the sun, with a crown of twelve stars upon her head, and the moon 
beneath her feet. It is the symbol of the church of Christ, girt about with 
divine and celestial glory, having heaven's own light for hers, and so lifted 
up above the corruption and darkness of this lower sphere that she puts 
beneath her feet all that earth reckons dazzling and attractive. Such is the 
kingdom of Christ in the soul — a kingdom of inexhaustible and inconceiv- 
able grace. 

But this kingdom of grace is not many, — it is one. That perfect glory of 
unity which has been imaged forth in poetry and architecture, in church 
hierarchies and universal empires, finds its archetype and realization only 
here. It is not a kingdom set up here and there in isolated souls, but a 
kingdom compact in organization and permeated with one life. It is the 
grandeur of human government that it approximates to the control of indi- 
vidual wills, and to some degree secures the subordination of men to law. 
To hold the reins of the fierce and uncertain winds so that they obey one's 
call, and speed forth upon one's errands, would be something marvelous, — 
but to guide and control millions of human wills more fickle and changeful 
than the winds, making them all yield homage to just law and reducing their 
wild impulses to order, is a task immeasurably greater. Only the divine 
kingdom blends all these diverse elements into complete and perfect unity. 
The kingdom of God contemplates nothing less than a gathering together, in 
one harmonious and blissful society, of all holy souls of all lands and ages. 

It is a significant fact that the Bible does not end with the gospels and 
their setting forth of Christ's life and teachings, — does not end with the 
Acts of the Apostles and its proclamation of salvation to the nations through 
the crucified and risen Redeemer, — does not end with the epistles and their 
profound exposition of the indwelling of Christ in his church, — but ends with 
the Revelation of St. John, in which we see, through the glass of prophecy, 
the final victory of the Lamb over all the combined hosts of the world's 
opposition and rebellion, and the gathering of all the saints into the City of 
God. The salvation of the individual is not the great end of God's economy 
of redemption, but rather the erection of a glorious community of innumer- 
able holy souls, bound together as here by a common character and des- 
tiny and life, and forever united there in a closeness of intercourse, a rap- 
ture of worship, and an intensity of loving activity, compared with which 
the streaming tides of life that meet and mingle in modern London, or that 
swept through the forum of Ancient Rome at the triumphal entries of her 
world-famed victors, were but mean and insignificant. Not isolation, but 
blessed and endless companionship, is to be the law of the kingdom of God. 

. " O scenes surpassing fable, and yet true ! 

Scenes of accomplished bliss ! which who can see, 
Though but in distant prospect, and not feel 
His soul refreshed with foretaste of the joy ! " 

Nor is the kingdom a kingdom of this earth alone. Included in the 
broad design is the renovation of this sin-burdened planet, and the union of 
its life and history with those of other orders of creation. For man is not 



364 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING. 

the sole offspring: of Jehovah. The universe is broad and full of glittering 
worlds. Our earth is but a speck in the vast expanse. We sometimes won- 
der whether the planets and suns of the Milky Way are inhabited. Astron- 
omy cannot answer, — but the Scriptures assure us that, whether possessed of 
local habitations or not, there are in this universe myriads of majestic intel- 
ligences who pass to and fro on divine missions, and are specially interested 
in the grand drama that is representing on the earth. These principalities 
and powers in heavenly places, these ranks of unf alien illustrious angelic 
spirits, bend down from their lofty seats and peer into the mysterious prog- 
ress of events upon this little globe, — for the planet where the King of 
glory bore the cross, though it is not the physical centre, must yet be the 
spiritual centre, of creation. Milton could not have been greatly wrong 
when he represented the unf alien Adam as blessed with the converse and 
instruction of angels. Our Savior, we have reason to believe, was declaring 
not only his own glory, but the normal and destined glory of human nature 
in him, when he asserted that his disciples should yet see the heavens 
opened, as they were in Jacob's dream of the heavenly ladder, and the 
angels ascending and descending upon the Son of man. But how fallen 
are we from our first estate ! Still, as in Eden, 

" Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, 
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep," — 

but our eyesight is not keen enough to behold them. The earth is not now 
a watch-tower, from which we may descry the pursuits of the glorified and 
observe the dealings of God with other spheres, but rather a prison-house, 
through whose bars we get only dim and faint glimpses of the great creation 
spread around us. 

"Why is it," asks a later writer on astronomical discovery, "why is it, 
that man is doomed to this isolation in space, with no bond of sympathy 
between him and other worlds? Ah, it is sin that has made the earth a 
prison, instead of an abode of liberty where we might hold converse with 
other pure and glorious spirits. But are we doomed to this isolation for- 
ever? No, the yearnings of our own hearts and the teachings of revelation 
alike assure us that one grand aim of the scheme of redemption is to remedy 
and perfect the bond of sympathy that was broken by the fall, and to bring 
us into closer alliance with' all the various grades of moral intelligences 
throughout the universe. The great system is like a magnificent harp, all 
whose strings are in tune but one. That one string out of tune makes a jar 
in the whole. The whole universe will feel the effects of redemption, when 
once this jarring world is put in tune by the hand of love and mercy." 
(Jod's kingdom will not be fully come, until all things in the universe are 
gathered together and harmonized in Christ, — 

" And earth is changed to heaven, and heaven to earth, — 
One kingdom, joy, and union, without end." 

For this kingdom, once established, shall never be destroyed. The 
causes that bring decrepitude and death to earthly monarchies shall never 
exist there. The infinite reaches of eternity shall be the arena which the 
inventive mind of God shall fill with revelations, and histories, and new 
creations. But all these ages shall be one. All dispensations as well as all 
worlds shall be reconciled in Christ. The Saints shall sing the song of 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING. 365 

Moses and the Lamb, not because the song of Moses at the Red Sea will 
fully express the rapture of God's redeemed, but because they shall see all 
God's great deliverances, from the days of Pharaoh's overthrow to the time 
of Satan's final downfall, to be all parts of one great whole, and all to be 
deliverances through the Lamb. To them God's incomprehensible designs 
shall be unveiled, — to them the mystery shall be finished. Taking in the 
wide prospect of God's universal empire, they shall behold in God's earliest 
dealings with the race the seeds and prophecies of all the future, and 
throughout the whole course of history shall perceive the order and beauty 
of an infinitely wise and symmetrical plan. Then they shall see that there 
has been a Christ in history, from the beginning to the end, working through 
history, and making known the glories and perfections of the one living and 
true God. The kingdom of God shall be the perfect revelation of himself in 
and to his creatures,- — and therefore it shall be, not only a kingdom of right- 
eousness, but a kingdom of eternity. The events of this little world with 
all its wondrous history are but a single part, though they may be the initial 
or central part, of a sublimer unity. Tlie kingdom of God for which the 
old Hebrews looked in the midst of the ages, is not a kingdom of this world 
alone, or of all present worlds alone, but a kingdom of far-reaching ages, 
including all past, and present, and future worlds, with all their histories. — 
a kingdom not of space only, but also of duration, all-comprehending and 
infinite. For unto the Son hath the eternal Father said: ''Thy throne, O 
God, is forever and ever!" The kingdom of grace shall be merged at last 
In the kingdom of glory,— but the laying down of Christ's mediatorial 
sceptre over this revolted province of his empire shall only inaugurate 
the fuller splendors of that perfected reign in which the triune God shall be 
all in all to his creatures. 

Thus our thoughts are led on and on, as we contemplate the nature and 
extent of God's kingdom, till the greatness of it is overburdening and our 
weak faith staggers, even amid the intensity of our desire for its coming. 
Let us then betake ourselves to the prayer which our Lord has taught us : 
"Thy kingdom come." That teaches us three lessons; first, that the king- 
dom of Christ shall come, — it is God's design to answer that prayer, since 
no such prayer would ever have been left by Christ to his church, had it not 
been the purpose of him who inspired it to bring about its complete and 
perfect fulfilment. Secondly, the effectual power that is to secure the 
triumph of this kingdom is not of man but of God, — since we are taught to 
look to God in prayer for the exertion of his power, through the agencies 
he has appointed, namely, his word, his church, and his Spirit. Thirdly.- 
■ — and to this lesson of the Lord's prayer, I must confine your thoughts for 
the few remaining moments of my address — the coming of the kingdom of 
God has been made dependent upon the prayers and labors of his people, 
■ — when he bids us pray "'thy kingdom come." he intimates that our prayer 
shall ensure a blessing which otherwise would never be bestowed, — while he 
has ordained in his eternal purpose the certain triumph of his kingdom, he 
has ordained also that prayer shall be the intermediate agency through 
which that triumph shall be secured. That prayer which is the voice not 
of the lips but of the inner being, which is the expression of the permanent 
desires of the soul, which carries with it not only the heart's devotion but 
the self-sacrificing labors of the life — that prayer God has decreed shall be 



366 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING. 

the channel through which all blessing flows to the church and the world. 
While we admire the greatness of the divine plans and the certainty of their 
execution, let us remember that we can be no idle spectators of God's work- 
ing, — a responsibility rests on us as vast as the interests at stake, — the 
honor of God and the salvation of a world are made to hang on the faith- 
fulness and zeal of Christ's disciples. — the kingdom is near or far, just in 
proportion to the love and faith and prayerful toil of the church. 

And the sooner we wake up to the fact that for all purposes of practical 
duty and privilege, we are the church of Christ, the better it will be for us, 
and the better for the kingdom. There is a mock humility that shirks duty 
and stifles faith. Brethren of the Judson Society, this prayer, "thy king- 
dom come," is our trumpet-call to arms and to battle for the kingdom of 
God. Not one of us can truly pray "thy kingdom come," without giving 
himself body and soul to that work in which he can best promote the com- 
ing of the kingdom. By just so much as Christ has endowed us with native 
ability and with opportunities of culture, by just so much are strengthened 
his claims to the use of our gifts in the building-up of his sovereignty on 
earth. In this day when autos-da-fe have ceased and papal fulminations 
have lost their terror, in this day when the opposition of Satan is so exclus- 
ively intellectual, there is need, as never before, of educated talent in the 
ministry and church of Christ. To every young man entering upon life, the 
question ought to come: "How can I use my powers for God and the sal- 
vation of the world with greatest economy of force, — how can I most surely 
make every faculty and attainment bear directly upon the coming of the 
kingdom of God?" Be sure that Christ has portioned out, to each of us 
who are his followers, some share in the work he is accomplishing on earth. 
Seeking earnestly to know where our work lies, whether in secular or in 
sacred duties, at home or abroad, and falling in with the plan of Christ when- 
ever it is made known to us, we may have the assurance and comfort, in 
labor, in suffering, and in death, that our lives have not been wasted in the 
service of the world, but have contributed, however humbly, to bring about 

" That one far off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves." 

My brethren, the greatness and power of God and the majesty of his kingdom 
are revealed to us not to give us excuse for idleness, but to furnish incite- 
ment to arduous and self-forgetful labor. The certainty of triumph is the 
greatest stimulus to earnest warfare. The grandest victories for the truth 
which the world has seen have been gained by men who were strong in the 
thought of God's eternal purposes, and who found in Jehovah the motive power 
of their lives. "When the Jewish people were enslaved under Antiochus Epi- 
phan.es, that monster of successful iniquity — so enslaved that the sacred Scrip- 
tures were a forbidden book which it was death to possess or read, and the 
statue of the heathen Jupiter was set up for worship in the plundered sanctu- 
ary of the temple — the Asamonean family, one reverend old man and five 
heroic sons, called upon the nation to rise for religion and freedom. Thous- 
ands gathered round them and vowed to " stand for the Law " till death. Upon 
the banner which was borne before the patriot host were inscribed those stir- 
ring Hebrew words from the book of Exodus: Mi CamoTca Baalim Jehovah* 
"Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?" — and from the initial letters 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND ITS COMING. 3G7 

of that inscription — "M," "C," "B" — the Maccabees took their name. The 
motto of their standard became the inspiration of their war for independence. 
Trusting as their ancestors did in the omnipotence of God, they were enabled 
to shake off the yoke of the oppressor and to lift the nation from lethargy 
and apostasy to a religious zeal which had been unknown for centuries. 
And the Maccabees themselves — what examples of splendid devotion to 
religion and country have they left to after ages! My brethren, God has 
revealed to us his power and purpose to set up his kingdom for this same 
end that we, like the Asamonean family, may call upon him for great and 
mighty things, and then, believing his word and promise, may undertake 
great things for his glory. Let us combine with the motto of the Maccabees, 
"Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?" that other motto of 
Paul's, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me," and 
then let us go forth to do battle for the kingdom of God. 

To do battle till wo die, or the kingdom fully come. No rest for the sol- 
diers of the cross, till the enemy is ours. No halt to the advancing army, 
till the world is conquered for Christ. Though the standard-bearers fall, 
though the years <rliile by and yet the promised end seems far away, aye, 
though seeming defeat may cloud our banners, still let the sacramental host 
press on. For Christ never dies ; Christ never desponds ; Christ never is 
defeated ; and the Spirit of Christ is the Spirit of the Church. In the days 
of Queen Elizabeth, when the Jesuits were essaying by every art to restore 
in England that reign of papal darkness which the rising sun of the Refor- 
mation had just turned to clay, they entered into solemn vows, that so long 
as there was any one of them left for the gallows, the torture, or the dun- 
geon, they would never cease their endeavors to set up the Catholic religion 
in that kingdom. That miscalled Society of Jesus has left to the church, 
the true Society of Jesus, an example in this regard, which if we do not 
follow, we are false to our vows, false to ourselves, false to humanity, and 
false to Christ our King. Rather shall we not follow it, concentrating every 
faculty and power upon the work of Christ, and resolving never for one 
moment to remit our toil till his supreme dominion is set up in every human 
heart? With the mighty noise of this conflict of the ages in our ears, with 
the looming grandeur of the throne of God before us, with the vast sweep 
of eternity for our dwelling-place, let us not give our lives to ease or to 
profit or to human fame, but to the end for which Christ lived, the end for 
which Christ died — the interests and the triumph of the kingdom of God. 
If we thus live and thus die, it will make little matter whether our names 
are honored on earth, — we shall have the honor that comes from God, and 
we shall reign with Christ forever and ever, — for the kingdom that comes 
from heaven, and that makes heaven on earth, shall end at last in heaven. 
But whether we be true subjects or not, whether we give our lives to the 
kingdom or not, the kingdom shall come. To those who welcome it and 
labor for it, it shall be a kingdom of eternal blessedness and glory, — but upon 
whomsoever this stone shall fall, it shall grind him to powder. Christ will 
subdue us by the might and loveliness of his grace if may be, but if not by 
his grace, yet still he will subdue us. For "at the name of Jesus, 
every knee shall bow, of things in heaven and things in earth and things un- 
der the earth, and every tongue shall confess that he is Lord, to the glory 
of God the Father." 



XXXVI. 
LEAVING THE NIXETY AXD XIXE/ 



The early Christians delighted to picture Christ as the Good Shepherd 
In Tertullian's time, they painted him thus upon the cup used at the Lord's 
Supper; and. a little later, they lightened the gloom of the Catacombs l»y 
representations of one who had snatched the lost sheep from the lion's jaw*, 
and who bore it back to the fold with rejoicing. Unlike many of the devices 
of ecclesiastical art, this one has full warrant in Scripture. The text tells 
the story more pathetically than any statue or fresco possibly can. The 
one sheep wandering from the rest, and unable of itself to find its way back 
to the fold ; the shepherd taking no pleasure in the multitude of his flock 
that feed unharmed about him, so long as that one erring one is exposed to 
death; the girding of himself for his departure, and the long anxious 
search over the dark mountains for the lost; the perseverance that gives 
itself no rest until he finds it, even though the shepherd's feet and hands 
are pierced with bitter thorns along the way ; the joy of the return, when 
he brings back upon his shoulders the rescued one, who even now has not 
strength enough to walk alone, — these are features of the parable that touch 
our inmost hearts. But. of all the strokes that give impressiveuess and 
pathos to the picture, I know of none so masterly and so divine as the ques- 
tion : "Doth he not leave the ninety and nine?" 

There have been many interpretations of it. The ancient expositors saw 
in it an allusion to that condescension of the eternal Son which led him to 
leave the many mansions of his Father's house on high, with their myriads 
of unfallen intelligences, that he might quench his light in the darkness of 
this little sphere, and so restore this one wanderiug world to its true place 
in the great system of God. There were ninety and nine loyal planets that 
revolved around the central sun. But one had forgotten its allegiance, and 
had shot off like a comet into the distant night. He who once spoke them 
all into being now follows, and from the very night of death recovers the 
one lost world by passing into that night of death himself. In modern 
times, we have been accustomed to apply the parable, not to the one world 
that is lost, while the many races of God's great universe still render joyful 
obedience, but to the one soul that has gone astray, and has become a prey 
to Satan. What does it matter to the tender Shepherd that such a multi- 
tude are safe within the fold, so long as one poor sinner is involved in the 
misery and guilt of sin. and is in danger of everlasting death? To bring one 
such sinner back, he thinks it none too great a sacrifice to lay down his life. 



* A sermon before the American Baptist Missionary Union, at its annual 
meeting, Indianapolis. May 22. 1SS1. on the text. Mat. IS: 12 — "'Doth he 
not leave the ninety and nine?" 

3§8 



LEAVING THE NINETY AND NINE. 369 

These are the common interpretations. I make no doubt that both of 
them are true. There is a principle here that may have great variety of 
application. It is the principle that the weakest, the most needy, the most 
miserable, are in a true sense nearest to the Savior's heart. His compassion 
is measured only by the depth of man's want. And so I bring you still 
another interpretation of the parable, equally true with the others, this, 
namely : That Christ yearns over the heathen more than he does over the 
Christian lands, and that his Spirit moves the church to leave the ninety and 
nine that are safe within the fold of Christendom, and to go out after those 
who are perishing in their pagan depravity and wretchedness, uutil she find 
them, and bring them back to God. 

I am well aware that such an application as this runs directly counter to 
the current of popular opinion in our day. Modern objections to missions 
have changed their form ; but they are more subtle, and with a large class 
of persons they are more powerful than ever before. Christian people feel 
them, even if they do not urge them. We do not deny the needs of the 
heathen, nor the duty of evangelizing the world. But we are inclined to 
choose our methods, and to consult the natural laws of civilization and prog- 
ress, more than we consult the commission of Christ and the promise of his 
Spirit. We are bidden to distinguish between the advancing and the decay- 
ing races, and to confine our efforts to those which still have stamina and 
inherent powers of growth. What hope, we are asked, what hope of per- 
manent success among a people already on the verge of extinction, like the 
North American Indians, or dying of their vices, like the islanders of the 
South Seas? Of what use was it for John Eliot to give his life to translat- 
ing the Bible into an Indian tongue, when there does not now remain a 
single living Indian who can read it? Tribes without a history are not 
worth the saving, say the critics. The stuff is too soft to take a stamp, or 
to give a stamp to others. The Hottentots of Africa are of as little account, 
so far as mental vigor and influence upon the world are concerned, as the 
swarming ants of one of their own ant-hills ; and there have not been want- 
ing philosophers who could coolly say that we should do with them just 
what we do with an ant-hill, — namely, stamp on them, and stamp them out 
of existence. 

This reasoning is supported, moreover, by an appeal to apostolic labors. 
The first disciples did not scatter themselves among the Gentiles, we are 
told : they were commanded to tarry at Jerusalem, the central stronghold 
of Judaism. Then they seized upon Antioch, the great commercial entre- 
pot between East and West. Paul did not waste his time in country towns. 
He betook himself to Ephesus and Corinth, as strategic points from which 
whole provinces might be invaded and subdued. He garrisoned the capitals 
for Christ, and trusted that from them the gospel would move upon the 
great outlying regions which they commanded. In fact, nothing would 
satisfy him but to preach the gospel at Rome. He would make the masters 
of the world acknowledge the mastership of Christ, knowing that, when the 
strength of Rome had enlisted under the Savior's banner, the weaker nations 
would follow her lead. So our new guides would have us devote ourselves to 
the strong races. Preach the gospel to the Caucasian, who has mind enough 
to appreciate it and force enough to propagate it. Be sure not to underrate 
24 



370 LEAVING THE NINETY AND NINE. 

the Anglo-Saxon race, and that special portion of it which we ourselves 
represent. In short, American soil furnishes the proper field for the gos- 
pel. If you would reach other nations, you will find the best specimens 
of them here. God has sifted the races of the earth and brought the ilite 
of them all to our shores. We can best evangelize China, by preaching to 
the Chinese in California ; Africa, by teaching the negroes at the South ; 
Germany, by missions among the Germans of Milwa»i--?e and Kansas. Do 
your foreign work at home. Educate and Christians yourselves ; and, by 
the same rule, confine your chief attention to the most promising classes 
within your own borders. Aim at the talent and culture of the land. Let 
the degraded and the ignorant die out, or at least shift for themselves. The 
best way to pervade a nation with truth and righteousness, is to raise up an 
intellectual and spiritual aristocracy. Not a farthing-candle in myriads of 
houses, but the kindling here and there of electric lamps that shall shine 
like suns. So to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not 
shall be taken away even that which he hath. 

It is, of course, a reductio ad absurdum; but, since many of these notions 
are prevalent, and wherever they prevail are paralyzing missionary zeal; it 
may be well to consider carefully the grain of truth that is in them, and also 
the deadly error. The element of truth is simply this : God's providential 
arrangement of nations, and of influential centres in those nations, is to be 
consulted in our evangelistic plans. Other things being equal, it is a duty 
to avail ourselves of the natural currents of commerce and literature, to 
seize upon political strongholds, and upon the strong men who offer them- 
selves for the service of the gospel. The field is the world, and the world 
includes America as well as Hindustan. There are many sorts of places, for 
many sorts of men. Some are as truly called to serve Christ at home as 
others are to serve him abroad. There are talents and endowments which 
distinctly mark men for work of teaching and leadership in this land. There 
are tasks and impulses which as distinctly mark men for pioneer enterprises 
in Africa, or for Bible translation in China. Then, too, we must go wherever 
we can go. God opens the door, and we must enter it. We must follow in 
the line of geographical exploration, and tread the highways of commerce. 
We owe more to Africa, than we did before Livingston had reached Lake 
Nyassa, and Stanley had traced the course of the Congo. Fifty years ago, 
we might have been better pardoned for not attempting missions to Japan, 
than now, when the ancient wall of Japanese exclusiveness is beaten down. 
And so with regard to castes and classes. We must take what God sends. 
If he will not first give us access to the. proud and cultivated Burman, 
we must welcome the conversion of the Karens. If the Teluga Brahmins 
will not embrace the gospel, thousands of the Pariahs will. We must work 
in the line of God's providences, remembering that there is a supernatural 
element in missions, and a wisdom not of this world, which chooses the 
foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and weak things of this 
world to confound the mighty, and base things of this world, and things 
which are not, to bring to naught things that are, that no flesh should glory 
in his presence. 

So we may answer objectors to our plan of distant work among races and 
classes that do not lead the van of civilization, — answer them by saying that 



LEAVING THE NINETY AND NINE. 371 

we are men under authority, with inarching orders to go into all the world, 
to enter every open door, to preach to every creature who is willing to hear, 
trusting results to him who sends us. But there is much more than this tc 
be said. I wish to show not only that we must do this, but that we ought 
to do it; not only that God has shut us up to this course, but that his wkys 
are justifiable even to human reason. In place of the policy of repression 
and confinement — what we may call the dark-lantern theory of missions, 
the keeping of our light to ourselves, concentration of effort upon the 
favored and the strong — I urge the leaving of the ninety and nine, and the 
seeking out of the weak and the lost. And this for four reasons : first, that 
this is the irrepressible instinct of Christian love. You cannot narrow 
down its regards, if you would. Love is not calculating. It does not bar- 
gain for just so much success in its efforts, before it will put them forth. It 
does not graduate itself by the present worth, but only by the present need, 
of its abject. Self-interest and self -gratulation work in order (o get, love 
works in order to give. Its natural impulse is toward the weakest. The 
true mother will love most of all the child that is deformed or blind, — -ay, 
strange to say, the gleams of sense that now and then cross the mental 
darkness of her half-idiotic boy will waken thrills of sympathetic and com- 
passionate joy in that mother's heart, that she never feels at the triumphs 
of her gifted sons. And to say that Christian love has like feelings toward 
the outcast and those for whom no others care, is only to say that it is love. 
What ! let the illiterate and the drunkard go their way, because the educated 
and the temperate are so much more worthy of our efforts? Ah, that is 
just what Christian love cannot do ! The ignorant and the self-despairing 
shall be the very objects of the Christian's regard. 

That was a very safe test by which Professor Tyndall proposed to gauge 
the results of prayer. The whole Christian world were invited to concen- 
trate their petitions upon one ward of a certain hospital, while they left the 
other wards unprayed for. Then it could be ascertained whether prayer 
accomplished anything. Professor Tyndall forgot that the thought of that 
ward for which nobody cared would set thousands of Christian people praying 
for its inmates, so that the proposed test would test nothing. Paul does not 
graduate his love for his converts by the love he gets from them in return. 
He will love them the more, the less he is loved. No — we might as well 
acknowledge it — Christian love is very different from mere prudence. Its 
very essence is self-sacrifice. It lives by dying, as Christ did. In fact, 
Christian love is nothing but the Christ in us, repeating his disinterested 
devotion of himself to the uplifting of the fallen and the rescue of the lost. 

Missions to the inert and degraded races, then, are not a hard compulsion 
put upon the church, — they are a carrying out of the inmost impulse of the 
Christian heart. Morrison thanks God when he is sent to China, because 
he considers it an answer to his prayer for a place to work where the needs 
are the greatest, and where, regarded from a human point of view, there is 
least chance of success. Is this wisdom? Still, I maintain that it is; and 
I urge, as a second reason for leaving the ninety and nine, that this has 
proved historically to be the method of success. The beginnings of Chris- 
tianity were not in a growing nation, nor among the Caucasian race. It 
was among the Semitic stock, and in an Asiatic land, that its preparation and 



372 LEAVING THE NINETY AND NINE. 

Inception took place. The Jew seemed to have run his course, and to have 
succumbed to the common fate of Orientals — political despotism, physical 
stagnation, intellectual bigotry. " Crcdat Judceus Apella" indicated the 
narrow credulity everywhere attributed to him. He had had no king of his 
own race for five centuries. Rome had put her foot upon his neck. The 
conquering race was at the West. The Caesars had come, and the world 
was bowing beneath their sway. Where shall Christianity inaugurate her 
mission? Surely, it will be in the emperor's palace, or at least under the 
shadow of the Capitoline Hill. But no, it is to a continent from which the 
rod of empire has forever passed away, to a race that is to make no more 
figure in political history, to a people enslaved and scattered, to a town that 
has become a by-word and a hissing, that Jesus comes to begin his redeem- 
ing work. He passes by Rome, and he begins at Nazareth. He leaves the 
advancing, and he takes the decaying, race. From that race of Jews he 
chooses his apostles — yes, his chiefest apostles, — so that Paul becomes the 
apostle of the Gentiles, and Peter comes to be the patron saint of Rome. 
The Jew conquers the Roman ; the decaying race subdues its masters. 

Was there cold-blooded neglect of the insignificant country towns, in the 
apostolic labors? What were Derbe and Iconium and Lystra but rude, 
provincial places, with a heathenish jargon of a language which the apostles 
could not understand? Did Paul stop with Rome, or did he go, after his 
first imprisonment, to the regions beyond? Surely, the perils of robbers 
and of the deep, through which he passed, were not all incurred in civilized 
lands. And why is it that we know so little of the labors of the eleven 
apostles ? No answer can be given but this : Their lives were missionary 
lives, spent in comparative obscurity for the most part, and the record of 
them written, not on earth, but or high. So Christianity made its begin- 
nings. And so has been its subsequent history. Where should we be, in 
the scale of civilization or religion to-day, if Augustine, the Roman abbot 
in the sixth century, had confined his Christian zeal to efforts in behalf of 
the ruling race, instead of undertaking that mission to Britain and to those 
barbarous English ancestors of ours? Thirteen hundred years of history 
have justified that leaving of the ninety and nine, to whom belonged the 
strength and culture of the world, and that seeking after the sheep that 
were lost. Christianity has recreated that English race, and has given it an 
empire more noble and spiritual than Rome ever knew. And now, when 
missions have made us what we are, shall we turn coldly away from the 
nations which stand where we then stood? I know that it takes time to 
work these wonders. "Providence," it has been said, "moves through 
time as the gods of Homer moved through space : it takes one step, and 
ages have passed away." The gospel can recreate nations, as well as indi- 
viduals; but in the lifetime of a nation, not in the lifetime of an individual, 
shall the change be wrought. Let us give God time to show what he can 
do. The single century of modern missions affords but small basis for a 
theory which contradicts nineteen hundred years of history and the teaching 
of the whole word of God. 

I advocate the opposite theory of missions — the theory of leaving the 
strong and going out after the weak — upon the ground, thirdly, that this 
oest accords with the great doctrinal truth of the unity and solidantv 



LEAVING THE NINETY AND NINE. 373 

of the race. God has made of one blood all nations. They are bound 
together by a common descent from the first Adam, but equally by a com- 
mon relationship to the second Adam, who joined himself to humanity to 
save it. Sin is self-isolating, and ignores this relationship. Christ's spirit 
gives us the feeling of brotherhood once more. Sin says, "Am I my 
brother's keeper?" Christ's spirit says, "I am a debtor both to the Greeks 
and to the barbarians." Sin looks upon mankind as segregated atoms, dis- 
connected individuals. The spirit of Christ regards humanity as an organ- 
ism, pervaded with one life. Sin counts as foreigners and enemies all who 
are not demonstrably of our particular family. The spirit of Christ sees in 
every Greenlander a soul for which the Redeemer died, and in the Malayan 
and Patagonian, members of a common humanity with ourselves — a 
humanity capable of indefinite progress, and with such claims upon our 
sympathy and help, that for them we should be willing to lay down our 
lives. See what provision God has made for breadth, as well as for intensity, 
in our missionary zeal. We are guarded against apathy by the thought that 
each single soul has in it capacities of infinite expansion. We are guarded 
against narrowness by the thought that every such soul is only the infini- 
tesimal part of a grander unity. The greatness of the race looms up before 
us; the mass of its guilt and degradation appals us; we see what crushed 
the soul of Christ in Gethsemane and broke his heart on Calvary. As we 
get nearer to Christ in our personal experience, the sense of this oneness 
grows upon us, until we see that all the nations together constitute the 
humanity which he died to save. 

Away then with that proud idolatry of race which would count the Anglo- 
Saxon only as the elect of God ! Humanity is greater than we know. There 
are many aspects of the rounded sphere. Races come and go in history. 
Greek beauty and Roman organization have had their day. How do we 
know that the constitutional freedom of the Anglo-Saxon shall be more 
lasting? The newly emerging civilization of the Sandwich Islands, and the 
presence of the negro in the United States Senate chamber, show that there 
are capacities not yet developed, nations yet to come to the front. The 
Book of Revelation assures us that on the head of the conquering Christ 
there are to be many crowns. Many nations shall call him Lord. The new 
song of redeemed humanity shall be, not a song of one part only, which all 
shall sing in unison, but a song of many parts, each transformed race and 
tribe and kindred and nation of men furnishing its peculiar and inimitable 
and -indispensable elements in the grand harmony. We have no more right 
to despair of a nation, than we have to despair of an individual. God is able 
to turn back the tide of corruption in a nation, as well as in an individual, 
and begin a new development, as at the Reformation. So shall they "build 
the old wastes : they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall 
repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations." As we see in 
every human soul the possibilities of kingship and priesthood to God, so 
let us see in every tribe upon the footstool the possibilities of an illimitable 
progress in intellectual and spiritual power, and all tending to the triumphs 
of that day when the philosophic mind of the Orient and the practical vigor 
of the West shall in all their phases and varieties be given to Christ. Is no 
other race valuable but ours? Ah! the race most desperately sunk in super- 



374 LEAVING TIIE NINETY AND NINE. 

stition and idolatry to-day may in the long to-morrow place the brightest 
crown of all upon the brow of the Redeemer. We are bound to leave the 
ninety and nine, and go out after the benighted races, because humanity 
everywhere is one, and the work of the church is nothing less than to bring 
this whole humanity to the feet of its common Lord. 

But I argue this view, fourthly, from the poor economical consideration 
that, only as we thus in utter self-abandonment seek the salvation of the 
lowest and worst abroad, can we reach the highest and the best in charac- 
ter and activity at home. Here is the Christian paradox: "Give, if you 
would get; scatter, if you would increase; die, if you would live." Christ 
followed this rule, leaving heaven for earth, and conquering through death. 
And he came to diffuse his spirit through humanity. He did not point to 
his miracles as furnishing the chief evidence that he came from God. The 
blind were made to see, and the deaf to hear, indeed ; demons were cast out, 
and the dead were raised. But the climax was this : the poor have the gos- 
pel preached to them. With a divine radicalism, Christianity goes down to 
the deepest depth of human corruption and guilt, and, putting its mighty 
shoulders of love under the whole mass of man's shame and sin, lifts it up 
to purity and to God. Christianity works from below, upward. Only the 
self-devotion that is willing to give its efforts in behalf of the meanest will 
ever succeed in reaching the noblest, and in general it will reach the influ- 
ential and the rich only after it has proved its disinterestedness by laboring 
for the weak and the poor. I speak of course not of a mock gospel that 
gathers people of wealth and fashion into places of show, and dignifies its 
altar-parades with the name of worship. I speak of the real conversion of 
the rich to Christ. That, you may be sure, never takes place under the min- 
istry of those whose aim is simply to bring riches into the church, but only 
as the result of labor for the souls of men, irrespective of their temporal 
station. And so, seeking the lost abroad is the best means of stirring up 
effort at home. 

I do not know when Christ will come. I do not know whether the preach- 
ing of the gospel in all the world which is to precede his coming involves 
the hearing of it by every human being individually, or by each nation in 
the mass. But this I do know, — that the preaching of the gospel, which 
shall usher in the time of the end, will be a heart-service, on the part of the 
church, which shall labor by preference for the most desolate and down- 
trodden portions of mankind. What Christ wants is the throwing of our- 
selves into the breach, — not the quantitative estimate of our work, but the 
qualitative, — not how many have been won, but how much has been sacri- 
ficed. God has justified many an enterprise that seemed absolutely fool- 
hardy. The forlorn hope has often turned the tide of battle. Do not think 
that such victories abroad will ever involve loss at home. The reflex influence 
of them upon Christian character in Christian lands is worth all the cost. 
The sufferings of the Judsons at Oung-Pen-La have added heroism to thous- 
ands of Christian hearts in America, that could have been stirred in no other 
way so well. Let us remember that our Home Mission Societies trace their 
descent from the Foreign, and not the Foreign from the Home. It is my 
firm conviction that if every Christian preacher should go abroad, and the 
whole Christian church should precipitate itself upon heathendom as in the 



LEAVING THE NINETY AND NINE. 375 

days of the Crusades Europe precipitated itself upon Asia, there not only 
would be no ultimate loss, but the home field would flourish as never before, 
— aye, the mighty angel of the Apocalypse would soon bind Satan, and the 
millennial era dawn. I counsel no fanaticism. I recognize the fact that 
Providence puts obstacles in the way of some, which it would be criminal 
to disregard. But the danger of our day is not the danger of overstrained 
enthusiasm : it is the danger of self-indulgence and of unconscientiousness. 
We need the rousing of the martyr-spirit once more ; the resurrection of the 
church to a new life, of which we read in the twentieth chapter of the book 
of Revelation ; the choosing of the hard instead of the easy ; the leaving of 
the ninety and nine, for whom others will care, and the going out into the 
wilderness after the lost. In this course lies the only safety of the church; 
for the church as well as for the individual it is true, that whosoever will 
save his life shall lose it ; but whosoever will lose his life for Christ's sake 
shall find it. 

Thus I have urged upon you a theory of missions which human wisdom 
would never have suggested, but which, when once acted upon, proves itself 
to be the wisdom of God. I have urged the undertaking of the difficult, 
the seeking of the far away, the rescue of the tribes and the men that are 
vile and ready to die. I have urged this upon the ground : first, that this 
is the irrepressible instinct of Christian love ; secondly, that this is proved 
historically to be the method of success ; thirdly, that this best accords with 
the great doctrinal truth of the unity and solidarity of the race ; and, fourth- 
ly, that only this method will secure the highest development of Christian 
character and activity at home. But there is a sublimer and more conclusive 
reason still, — it is the fifth and last that I shall mention : . this plan is the 
plan that gives most glory to Christ, our Redeemer and our King. That 
which most reveals Christ most glorifies him ; for to glorify him is nothing 
more nor less than to make known his glory. This plan of missions most 
glorifies Christ, because it most closely follows the method of his own work 
as our Redeemer; it most absolutely casts itself upon his power and prom- 
ise as our King. Why does not Christ hasten his coming and his kingdom? 
Why do the isles yet wait for his law? Why has Calvin's motto, Domine, 
quousque? — "0 Lord, how long?" — been for so many centuries the cry 
of the church? The heart of God yearns over the apostate race. Surely 
there must be yet some obstacle to his bestowal of full favor upon it. Do 
you say that the atonement of Christ removed that obstacle forever? Yes. 
so far as to make it consistent with his holiness to give pardon to the peni- 
tent. But he has power to make men penitent. Why does he not more 
widely and gloriously exert that power? I know of no answer but this: It 
is his purpose to join the church with Christ in this great work of saving 
men ; and the full tide of grace is restrained, and God will not assume his 
full dominion in the earth, until his people shall present themselves as free- 
will offerings to his service. 

Brethren, in our weak fear of anthropomorphic representations of God, 
let us not deny that God has a heart, and that that heart is moved by the 
sacrifices and the deaths of his servants. Why, the ungodly world is moved 
by them ! When it sees that missionary mother, kneeling on a heathen strand 



37G LEAVING THE NINETY AND NINE. 

and gazing with straining eyes upon the vanishing ship that takes her chil 
dren from her forever, and then hears her cry with unlifted hands, "This I 
do for thee, Lord Jesus!" there is something in that more than martyr-like 
self-sacrifice that touches its heart also. The proud, hard, cold world is 
made to feel, when it sees Christ evidently crucified before it, in the uncom- 
promising and unsparing self-sacrifice of his followers. So Christ, lifted up 
in the self-devotion of Christians, shall draw all men unto him. But, if tho 
church's love for souls touches the heart even of the ungodly world, how it 
must move the heart of God ! He sees in it the reflection and reproduction 
of that love which led his Son to leave his bosom, and to endure even his 
forsaking. He sees in it the entrance of his redeemed people upon his own 
divine work of healing and salvation. It is the one way by which the church 
can reveal the mind and heart of God, and so make known his glory. And 
so the world shall not be brought back to God, until we who love him fill up 
that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ, for his body's sake, which 
is the church. Thus, suffering with him, we shall reign with him, and shall 
be partakers in his saving power. So, working greater spiritual wonders in 
the regeneration of men than even Christ wrought when he was here in the 
flesh, we shall hasten the coming of the day of God. 

The choosing of the dark places of the earth and the habitations of cruelty 
as fields for missionary effort gives most glory to Christ, not only because it 
most closely follows his own method as our Redeemer, but also because it 
most absolutely casts itself upon his power and promise as our King. To 
go alone to a tribe of cannibals; to attack single-handed a vast and hoary 
system of organized idolatry; "in the unresistible might of weakness," to 
brave the violence and hatred of a despotic error that counts a hundred mil- 
lions as its slaves, — this is to testify faith in a living omnipotent Christ ; 
this is to find the strength for Christian work, not in man, but in Him who 
sitteth upon the throne ; this is to make the method of our work, as well as 
our work itself, contribute to the glory of him "'of whom, and through whom, 
and to whom, are all things." When the church shall give herself to the 
work of men's salvation, and, trusting only in God's power, shall hurl her- 
self upon the stoutest and most bitter of God's foes, then God can have the 
glory, then God will begin to work as the world has never seen him work, 
then the Messenger of the covenant shall suddenly come to the defiled and 
ruined temple of humanity, then the darkness shall give place to light, and 
the glories of the latter day begin to dawn. 

I remember some years ago pressing my way up a remote and desolate 
Swiss valley, till I reached almost the boundary of everlasting snow. Grad- 
ually, the sky darkened, and a hurricane of wind and rain swept down from 
the glaciers. The roaring of the mountain-torrents and the crashing of the 
storm seemed almost to betoken the breaking-up of the foundations of the 
world. It was as if night had suddenly set in, and as if we, wrapped in 
clouds and darkness, were being seized and hurried away from a dissolving 
universe. Then, just as I was about to despair of safety, the dense black 
veil of driving cloud and storm parted in an instant, and through the rifl 
there shone down upon me the vision of a dazzling mountain-peak of snow, 
serene in sunshine, against a sky of cloudless blue; around, the furious, 



LEAVING THE NINETY AND NINE. 377 

hellish rush of dark and blinding and contending elements; above, the 
majesty of a spotless purity, and the beauty of an ineffable calm. So the 
power of God will be made known to the church and to the generation that 
seeks his glory through the dark path of self-sacrificing devotion to the fallen 
and the lost. May God give us all this spirit, whether we go beyond the sea 
or stay with the ninety and nine at home ! So shall the time come when 
the sign of the Son of Man shall indeed appear in the heavens, "when Christ 
shall come in power and great glory, when the kingdoms of this world shall 
become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ I 



XXXVII. 
THE ECONOMICS OF MISSIONS.' 



It Is now three score years and ten since the beginning of our American 
Baptist missionary operations. During these seventy years, the executive 
work of our Missionary Union has been conducted with an unsurpassed 
faithfulness and wisdom; its income has gradually increased from a few 
hundreds to over three hundred thousand dollars yearly; and greater results 
in the conversion of men to God have attended the labors of our mission- 
aries, than any other society can show. We attribute this, not to any devo- 
tion or zeal of ours, but to the special favor of God. Yet it would be 
uncandid if we did not say that, in our judgment, this success has been to 
some extent also attributable to the fact that our theory and method of mis- 
sionary work have been, more nearly than those of other denominations, 
conformed to the model set for us in the New Testament. We trust that 
model still, and we expect further and larger successes to demonstrate that 
it comes to us from God. 

Yet the apparent exigencies of particular times and situations endanger 
our faithfulness, and tempt us to ignore this model. The distance of the 
foreign field, and our comparative unfamiliarity with it, make us willing to 
accept excuses for an exceptional conduct of affairs there, which we should 
not be willing to allow at home. It has seemed to me that this is a favor- 
able time to consider in a broad way the economics of missionary effort, by 
which I mean, not economics in the narrow sense of financial economy of 
saving, but economics in the larger etymological sense of administration or 
management, — in other words, the principles of Christianity, of our denomi- 
national faith, and of business procedure, which lie at the basis of foreign 
missionary work, and by which it should be regulated. We are only at the 
beginning of that work. The world stretches out before us, waiting for our 
coming. The resources now at our disposal are very small, compared with 
those which the Spirit of God will in the future move his church to give. 
It is a matter of vast importance that we settle now upon a right theory in 
the establishment of missions, and upon right methods in their management. 
An error here, though it may seem a slight one, will be found, like an error 
in fundamental astronomical measurements, to multiply itself on and on 
indefinitely, until incalculable and irremediable evil finally results. 

Let me begin by mentioning certain principles which seem to me broadly 
and distinctively Christian. One is this : Seek by preference the degraded 
and the weak. God has taught us a lesson during these last seventy years, 
this namely, that the needy are the most accessible to the gospel, and that, 
when once won to Christ, they made the best propagators of it. Chris- 



An address before the Baptist Congress, Brooklyn, Nov. 14, 1S82. 
378 



THE ECONOMICS OF MISSIONS. 379 

tlan economics are not the economics of this world. They are the econo- 
mics of love and the economics of faith. And they justify themselves by 
the result, for God is in them. The mission to the Burmans, inaugurated 
by the heroism and devotion of the Judsons, after all these seventy years 
of labor, has made but little inroad upon that proud and ancient system of 
heathenism. But the mission to the Karens, a subject and almost a servile 
race, has been blessed more than any other mission of modern times, until 
the Burmans are beginning to ask what power this is that is lifting their old 
foot-balls and drudges up above themselves. When Mr. and Mrs. Clough 
tried to teach men of caste, their progress was slow and disheartening. 
When they received the Pariahs, the tide turned and converts came in like 
a flood. In England to-day the greatest successes of Christianity are found 
in high-church missions to the degraded classes of London, and in the mul- 
titudes of conversions that have followed the work of the Salvation Army. 
These things, and not the preaching of St. Paul's and the West End, are 
ringing through the Reviews, challenging the attention of scientific men, 
and proving that the gospel is not dead, but is still the power of God. And 
one of the noblest signs of life in our American Christianity is the revived 
interest in city missions that is felt among our churches, and the disposition 
to give liberal support to evangelizing efforts in the neglected quarters of 
New York. God bless these efforts, and make them a new demonstration of 
the great principle of missionary economics, that our first duty is to the 
weak, and that through the weak we best reach the strong! 

Our first duty, — but not our only duty. To say that we will give the gos- 
pel only to the poor, is to forget that the rich have souls as well as they. 
To say that the intellectual and refined are beyond us, is to deny the divinity 
and power of Christ. God leads certain detachments of his army agamst 
the very strongholds of the enemy— strongholds that are to be captured, 
not by sudden onset, but by long siege. A second important principle of 
missionary economics is that of — Persistent reinforcement of missions once 
begun, — at least until Christianity is embodied in vigorous working 
churches. We must remember that we have to deal with peoples, who, 
having lost the knowledge of the true God, have also lost all confidence in 
man, — peoples who regard the male missionary as a commercial speculator 
or a political emissary, and the female unmarried missionary as simply a 
concubine. The very idea of disinterested love has never dawned upon them, 
— it must be created from nothing, — only time will do the work. Mere 
preaching is not enough, — that is counted as so much "talk," — and the use 
of language, in heathendom, is not to express, but to conceal, one's meaning. 
What is needed is the slow demonstration of character, the exhibition of a 
Christian life, works of helpfulness and mercy, the gospel embodied in pity 
and love for the hardened and the lost. This at length moves the heart. 
Judson waited seven years for his first convert, — but the convert came. And 
when a hundred were gathered in a Christian church, his prophetic eye saw 
the work as if it were done, — Satan had fallen from heaven. The very lack 
of individuality among the heathen, which at first seems such a hindrance to 
their conversion, may prove an ultimate advantage, — for, let movement once 
begin, and the organic unity of family, caste, race, will send impressions 
through millions, and the massing of their force will be irresistible. We bless 



3S0 THE ECONOMICS OF MISSIONS. 

God now that we never gave up the mission to the Telugus. Let us never 
give up the mission to Siam. Let our second principle be Reinforcement, 
but never surrender. 

A third principle, — Evangelization before education or civilization. The 
truth is, you cannot educate or civilize to any good purpose, uuless Chris- 
tianizing has gone before. The English missionaries to the North American 
Indians began by providing homes for them, but the Indians did not want 
the homes. — they preferred the filth and squalor of their old life. Only 
as Christian influences taught them their spiritual needs, did th<\v seel; 
improvement of their outward condition. Some early Telugu missionary 
imported a case of shoes, to cover the feet of the bare-footed Hindus. His- 
tory does not relate what became of them. — but it is certain that the Telugus 
did not wear them. There are grave difficulties connected with the plan of 
lay-missionaries, or of colonies of Christian tradesmen. Among the Hindus, 
caste prohibits the employing of any but hereditary mechanics and artisans. 
Christian tradesmen could not find employment enough to keep them from 
starvation. The English Government is doing more to improve the farm- 
ing of the natives, than any missionary society possibly could. Experimeu 
tal farms are supported and fitted up with the best modern appliances ; the 
natives have seen these in operation for years ; and yet, before the famine 
of 1ST7-TS, only seventy-five steel ploughs in all had been sold to native 
farmers in the whole Madras Presidency. Nor are medical missionaries bo 
much needed. All the stations in the Telugu mission, except Ramapatam. 
have near them a free medical dispensary and hospital, in charge either of 
an English surgeon or of a competent apothecary ; and. up to the close of the 
famine, missionaries not located in such stations received free grants of 
medicines from the government, on application through a Collector. It may 
be doubted, indeed, whether a large amount of medical knowledge is not a 
hindrance, more than a help, to the work of the missionary. If he make a 
pecuniary charge for his services, his medical work ceases to be a matter of 
pure benevolence and an argument for Christianity: if he gives his services 
gratuitously, the crowds that come to him for merely physical relief prevent 
his giving any proper attention to the work of preaching. 

The gospel does not need education to precede it, any more than it needs 
civilization or general philanthropy. Schools come after preaching, both in 
time and importance. When the mind is waked up by conversion, there is 
an eager desire to know the truth. Individual reformations, like the great 
Reformation in Germany, are followed by a mighty quickening of thought, 
and an advance in intelligence. But education will not make men Chris- 
tians. It may only make them more accomplished and successful opposers 
of the truth. The merely secular gain derivable from an education fur- 
nishes a great motive to heathen young men to enter our mission schools. 
Once in these schools, their sole desire is to pass the examinations, and to fit 
themselves for government service, or for other remunerative employment. 
Mr. Bainbridge tells of a graduate of the Duff College, at Calcutta, who could 
speak twelve languages, but who declared that there was nothing so detest- 
able to him as Christianity. Our missionaries say that some of the worst 
heathen they have to do with, the most skeptical, dishonorable and trouble- 
some to native Christians, are those who have studied in mis-ion schools 



THE ECONOMICS OF MISSIONS. 381 

The schools of which I speak were not schools of our own denomination ; 
but, if I am not mistaken, there is a tendency toward mere secular education 
among our own missions, and against it these facts ought to warn us. Tho 
third principle of our missionary economics should be : Education and civ- 
ilization subsequent, and auxiliary, to the preaching of the gospel, and 
schools not secular, but Christian. 

But I must pass to consider certain principles which are distinctively 
Baptist. And the first of them is this : Converts should without unneces- 
sary delay be gathered into churches large enough to give some sense of 
companionship and strength, but small enough to permit of effective self- 
government. Here there is great need of a uniform method of procedure 
conformed to our denominational theory. We must not judge too harshly 
the short-comings of our missionaries when they are pressed with labors con- 
nected with a great revival. But we may certainly urge the importance of 
right beginnings in the evangelization of a great people, and no beginnings 
are right which do not result in the formation of effective working churches. 
On the one hand, converts should not be kept in large bodies, so scattered 
and unwieldy that they can hardly be called by the name of churches, and 
lacking in proper officers, discipline, and benevolent activities ; nor, on the 
other hand, should these converts be organized into extremely small bodies, 
so weak that they cannot sustain themselves, and must soon die out. 

The neglect properly to organize converts into churches must always 
increase the tendency to an Episcopal system of government. The repre- 
sentatives of other denominations declare indeed that every missionary is 
virtually a bishop, overseeing the native ministers. "Here," says Dr. Mul- 
lens, "is a practical New Testament Episcopate, sprung not from theory, 
but from circumstances ; an Episcopate forced on men of all churches — 
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, Wesleyans, and Lutherans." I 
do not find that he added, Baptists, but we need to be careful lest we be 
classed with the rest. In theory, we hold to a congregational church gov- 
ernment. We believe that the apostles left no successors ; that no minister 
has the right to exercise lordship over God's heritage; that there is no 
authority on earth superior to the body of believers. And to these princi- 
ples we ought everywhere and at all hazards to conform. 

There is great reason to believe that the seeming necessity of ministerial 
authority over mission converts in the first centuries of Christianity was one 
of the chief occasions of the rise of the whole hierarchical and papal system. 
In theory, we protest against every such perversion of the ministerial office. 
We hold that Christ is the only Lord; that every Christian has a direct 
relation to Christ, as Sovereign and Lawgiver. 

But it is certain that even among us there are men who, whether serving 
at home or abroad, never overcome their propensity to look down upon the 
Christians to whom they minister. It is certain that even among us there is 
a tendency on the part of missionaries to become bishops. I know that, 
after a great ingathering of converts, time is required to teach them their 
various duties, and that such converts are very immature and unused to self 
government. They will make mistakes, and those mistakes will sometimes 
be attended with serious loss. But this is not an argument against Baptist 
polity, but an urgent reason for it. As Macaulay has said: " The remedy 



382 THE ECONOMICS OF MISSIONS. 

for the evils of liberty is — liberty." The heathen convert must learn inde- 
pendence, by using his independence. Congregational church government, 
like democratic municipal government, Is itself an education and a school. 
To keep converts under the control of the missionary, instead of letting 
them govern themselves, is to condemn them to perpetual childhood, to 
repeat the error of Rome, to forsake the fundamental tenet of Baptist polity, 
to endanger the -whole future of our work. 

From American Baptists who have had prolonged acquaintance with our 
mission in France, I have gained the impression that the slow progress of 
our work in that country is in large measure due to the lack of understand- 
ing, on the part of our missionary pastors, of the meaning and the working 
of the congregational principle. In a country so long monarchical, the 
methods of liberty are very hard to learn. The pastor and the missionary 
find it much easier to govern a church themselves, than to teach it the art 
of self-government. There is much ignorance with regard to Baptist polity. 

There is much misapprehension, both at home and abroad, with regard to 
the real office of the missionary. The missionary is not a bishop. Still l"ss 
is the missionary an apostle. The missionary is simply an evangelist. He 
has no authority except that which belongs to every Christian preacher •who 
is deputed by the church to which he belongs at home to go out to labor in 
new fields. His business is not to impose his own law, but to teach Christ's 
law, — not to govern the churches he gathers, but to teach them to govern 
themselves. And from this follows the second Baptist principle in the 
economics of missions. It is this : The churches gathered from among the 
heathen should at once be taught the duty of self-support and of self-propa- 
gation. The missionary's relation to them is not a permanent one. He 
thoroughly succeeds, only as he makes his converts able to get along without 
him. You can test his work best by asking, not how they do while he Is 
with them, but how they do after he has left them. Does he teach his con- 
verts to provide for themselves, and then to provide for others? After their 
long centuries of oppression, heathen races are naturally servile.. They look 
up to the missionary, as a superior being. His word is law. It is not well 
for him to be fellow-member in a native church. It is not well for him to 
be director and guide of any single church, longer than is absolutely neces- 
sary. The church will never form the habit of self-dependence, if the neces- 
sity of it is delayed too long. Even the apostles speedily transferred pastoral 
duties from themselves to their converts. However much these converts 
wished to retain them, they hasted away to regions beyond, commending 
the church to God and to the word of his grace, which was able to keep 
them from falling. 

Dr. L. W. Bacon speaks well of "the necessity of a double faith — the 
faith which lays the original foundation, and the faith that leaves the native 
churches when the time has come, to self-direction and self-support, as Paul 
left the elders at Miletus, though he knew that grievous wolves would enter 
in, not sparing the flock." If there is any one thing which our missionaries 
and which Christians at home need to unlearn, it is their disposition to keep 
the mission churches under perpetual tutelage ; to distrust the permanency 
of the new seed of the divine life implanted in a heathen's soul ; or, which is 
the same thing, to doubt the wisdom of Christ in instituting a self-governing 
church, and the power of Christ to make that church self-supporting. 



THE ECONOMICS OF MISSION'S. 3S3 

No man ever knows what he can do, until he is put to the test. No man- 
hood can exist without the bearing of responsibility. And therefore we 
ought not only to teach our mission churches from the outset the duty of 
self-support, but after a reasonable time we ought to withdraw to other fields 
and leave them to support themselves or die. They will not die, if we leave 
them. They will die, of feebleness, if we do not. It is worthy of serious 
question whether our mission to the Karens has not reached a point where 
the best service we could render it would be to leave it to itself. Let the 
Theological Seminary remain, but let American preachers withdraw. And 
with all the abundant cause for gratitude among the Telugus, it is also a 
serious question whether the small rate of increase in native contributions 
during the past few years does not indicate a lack of instruction on this 
fundamental point, as well as over-slowness in organizing the converts into 
self-governing churches. 

My brethren, it Is the greatest of mistakes to do everything for our con- 
verts. They become convinced that missionaries, and those who send them, 
are very rich, that they are 'their father and mother," and that they them- 
selves need do, and need give, nothing. Dr. Anderson, of the American 
Board, never wrote a truer line than when he declared that "the self-sup- 
porting principle, in all its applications, needs an unsleeping guardianship 
and culture. The native churches, like young children, prefer things to be 
done for them. A wise missionary, and the Society which sustains him, 
should therefore from the outset resist the tendency which most missions 
show to perpetuate the dependent system." And Dr. Anderson is unques- 
tionably right. Sooner or later that system must be given up in every field 
where missions have had success. India must have its own type of Chris- 
tianity, and of preaching, and of church life. China can never be evangelized 
by a handful of foreigners. The main preachiug in foreign lands must be 
done by native preachers who can speak with an idiomatic freshness, with a 
force of familiar illustration, and with a sympathy of race and manners, such 
as no American can ever attain. And, therefore, the missionary must not 
simply preach himself, — he must organize and direct the labors of others, 
showing them how, laying the burden upon them, and finally leaving them 
to support and to extend the gospel that has saved them, with the Holy 
Spirit for their only helper and the word of God for their only guide. 

And now, finally, let me set before you two principles of missionary eco- 
nomics, which may properly be called business principles, as those I have 
mentioned were respectively Christian and Baptist. The first has reference 
to the relations between the Executive Committee of the Missionary Union 
and the missionaries whom it appoints and maintains. This committee 
should insist that all applicants for appointment to the foreign field should 
be not only persons of sound health, of well balanced mind, and of proved 
practical devotion — patient, self-reliant, successful, in Christian work at 
home — but also that they should possess something of linguistic ability, 
and that this ability should have been sharpened and developed by thorough 
training in the schools. The day has gone by when men should be sent abroad 
who have not mind enough, nor persistence enough, to go through a com- 
plete course of preparatory education. No student should be taken from a 
Theological Seminary, before he has finished his full three years of work. Na 



3S4 THE ECONOMICS OF MISSIONS. 

man who cannot learn I-atin or Greek should be thought capable of mastering 
the far more difficult Hindu or Chinese. Those who are sent, moreover, 
should be personally known by the Committee. Not only their linguistic- 
powers, but also their personal peculiarities, need to be learned by seeing 
them face to face in repeated interviews. Mistakes with regard both to the 
appointment of missionaries and the conduct of the foreign work might be 
avoided, if the Committee could study their men more carefully before they 
go out, and could consult them more frequently after they return. One 
of our oldest and most faithful missionaries declared that he had been in 
America and near Boston about a year, and had not had an interview wilh 
the Committee, and others who have been more than a year at home have 
had to solicit the only interview they have had. 

The Committee should insist that the new men whom they appoint should 
serve an apprenticeship for one or two years under some experienced mis- 
sionary, before being put in full charge of independent work. Dr. Jewett 
regards this working under the direction of an older laborer as an important 
qualification for usefulness anywhere upon the foreign field. Even though 
the novice is to devote himself to teaching, he needs to know what to teach, 
and how to make his teaching a help to properly evangelical work. This he 
can best learn by practical experience in field-work, under the guidance of 
one who knows the people, their colloquial language, and their common ways. 

Missionaries should be brought home, for the sake of health and contact 
with tnose who support them. And this change of scene should be more 
frequent, more regular, and also more brief, than it commonly is. Paul's 
missionary journeys were very successful, but none of them lasted more 
than four years. After each of them he came back to Palestine, and to the 
associations of his early days. The British in India have learned a valuable 
lesson, and now, in both the civil and military service, at the end of eight 
years of work, there comes a year of furlough. The first five years, of a 
missionary's life are more trying than any others. If. after five years, every 
new missionary could be brought home, and then, after a year of vacation, 
work in terms of eight years at a time, with a regularly recurring ninth year 
of rest, he would generally be not so entirely broken as to be unfit for a 
year of home service among the churches, his impressions would be more 
fresh and more easily given out to others, his health would be more easily 
recovered, and both for himself, the treasury, and the cause, it would be 
a matter of economy in the end. A narrow economy is a poor sort of 
economics, and a tender regard for the health of those who risk their lives 
in missionary service is the plain duty of the Board of Managers of our 
Missionary Union. 

It should be plainly understood that the Board of Managers, through 
their Executive Committee, have control of the missionaries whom they sup- 
port, and that, in cases where their rules are disobeyed, or where differences 
arise among the workers on the field, a corrective discipline should be 
exercised. The churches will support them in maintaining discipline, and 
in standing by their just rules, whoever among their servants in the field 
may suffer. One case of prompt action would obviate the necessity of many 
others, while one case of neglect and submission renders the Committee 
powerless in all similar cases that may arise in future. 



THE ECONOMICS OF MISSIONS. 385 

There will ever be divergent opinions with regard to particular measures. 
Missionaries will disagree. In such cases, the Board must decide. It can 
decide intelligently only as it knows the facts. It is important that the 
Secretary should personally know the missions of which he is the chief 
superintendent, and the suggestion of a journey on his part, once in ten 
years, in order that he may inspect the mission with his own eyes, and may 
hear the missionaries with his own ears, seems very wise and promising. 
We load the secretary and the Committee with heavy responsibilities. Do 
we give them sufficient facilities for performing their work? Years ago, a 
sad controversy with regard to preaching and schools threatened the pros- 
perity, if not the very existence, of our principal missions. A deputation 
sent to the other side of the world was a means, if not of harmonizing 
the conflicting opinions, yet at least of determining who among the mission- 
aries could carry out the instructions of the Board, and of enabling the 
great majority to work together,— and it proved a most salutary expedient. 
Another great missionary body, threatened with a similar evi! in Turkey, 
has recently appointed a deputation of the same sort. My contention is, 
that what has hitherto been done sporadically and infrequently, should be 
clone regularly and as part of our routine work. Our Methodist brethren 
allow no five years to pass without sending a Bishop around the world, and 
the advantage that accrues, in the way of unity of plan and intelligent 
direction, from that personal visitation of the scattered missionary fields, is 
felt to be richly worth all the cost. 

It has frequently been asked, by what methods the contributions of the 
home churches may be made more prompt and abundant, and how the inter- 
est of these churches in missions may be increased. The last of the business 
principles, which I shall mention, respects the relations of the Executive 
Committee to the churches and individuals who furnish the financial revenue 
of the Union. I must give my partial and qualified adhesion to the princi- 
ple of bringing special churches at home into connection with special fields 
abroad. It is of course to Christ that we give ; it is the whole world that 
we seek to save. But this does not forbid — it rather requires — that each 
Christian have particular persons at home whom he is striving to bring 
to Christ; nor does it forbid that he should have some particular people, 
province, mission-station, in which he is specially interested abroad. We 
want definiteuess in our prayers and our efforts. Twice as much money can 
be raised for a specified missionary laborer whose needs are known, as can 
be raised for the work in general. Our brethren of other denominations, 
though slow in adopting this principle, are beginning to see that it is the 
true principle of missionary support. The churches of Oberlin, Ohio, with 
the students of the College, Theological Seminary, and Ladies' Institute, 
have formed a "China Band," the object of which is to lay hold of several 
central points in the great province of Shansi, and eventually to build 
an Oberlin in China. Shansi is an inland province of the Empire, hitherto 
almost untouched by missionary effort. The American Board of Commis- 
sioners for Foreign Missions have given this province to the Oberlin Band. 
They have already four missionaries in the field, clearing the way, and three 
others are preparing to go. Oberlin has taken the responsibility, Oberlin 
furnishes the men, Oberlin is to support the work. 
25 



386 THE ECONOMICS OF MISSIONS. 

I am persuaded that we have here a principle of missionary economics 
which is yet destined to work a revolution among us. Not that our Union 
is in any way to cease its work of inauguration and superintendence, — it is 
needed to unify and control. All its present agencies are none too many to 
employ in the work of collecting funds. It should still be held responsible 
for the general work of instituting and caring for our missions. All mis- 
sionary moneys should pass through its treasury. All local societies should 
be simply auxiliary to it. Multitudes of individuals and of churches cannot 
take the responsibility of providing the entire support of a missionary. 
Let these combine their contributions as they do now, and let the Union 
administer the funds thus given. But wherever this is possible, let single 
states, single cities, single churches, single Sabbath schools, single mission- 
bands, single wealthy men at home, be encouraged to take up, and be respon- 
sible for the support of, certain missions, the evangelizing of certain prov- 
inces, the maintenance of certain schools, the salaries of certain missionaries, 
the living of certain native teachers, with the express qualification and 
stipulation, however, that their gifts shall all go through the treasury of the 
Union, and that the laborers whom they support shall all be controlled by 
the Union. In other words, let the privilege be offered, to all who will accept 
it, of doing some specific mission work in connection with our great Society, 
~the Society being the almoner and dispenser of their bounty, while it gives 
up none of its powers. Let individuals be encouraged to support specific 
missions, as Arthington of Leeds gave his fifty thousand to evangelize tbe 
newly discovered regions of Africa. We have wealthy men who could send 
the gospel into the heart of heathen empires. Let us give them the oppor- 
tunity,- — it will be better than offering them a kingdom. Who can doubt 
that missionary zeal would thus be quickened — that missionary contribu- 
tions would be doubled — that missionary laborers would be multiplied, and 
that new prayer to God and new triumph of his cause would attend the new 
movement of the churches? It is the principle of individual responsibility. 
I have urged it as a principle of business and financial management. But 
it is more than this — it is Baptist — it is Christian. Under God, it is the 
principle whose acceptance and observance will bring the world to Christ. 



XXXVIII. 
THE THEOLOGY OF MISSIONS.* 



On behalf of the Christian people of Rochester, and of the Faculty and 
students of the Rochester Theological Seminary, I most cordially and affec- 
tionately welcome this Alliance to our houses of worship, our Seminary 
buildings, and our homes. It gladdens our eyes and warms our hearts, my 
young brethren, to see this great company of young men whom Christ has 
called to preach his glorious gospel. Though you are from many parts of 
our continent, and from Seminaries of many Christian names, Christ's ban- 
ner floats over us all and we are one in him. In the name of Christ you 
come, and in the name of Christ we receive you. 

For several weeks, in our daily meetings at the Seminary, we have prayed 
that we might be able to communicate as well as receive good while you were 
with us. It may help you to get good, if I tell you something about the 
Seminary and the city that welcome you. This Seminary is not one of the 
oldest represented here, but it was founded a generation since by good men 
and true, many of whom have now entered into rest. The stones of its walls 
were laid in prayers and tears and sacrifices. God's blessing has rested upon 
it. There has never failed in it a truly apostolic succession of faithful stu- 
dents who have been willing to consecrate themselves to the work of mis- 
sions. Many have left us to go to the other side of the world as laborers in 
Burma and China, and the bones of some of them are buried now under the 
shadow of heathen temples and pagodas. Others are sowing seed for great 
future harvests in the rich new fields of Dakota and Colorado and California 
and Oregon. 

This city to which you come has been a city of revivals. Nature and art 
have done something for it, but grace has done more. In 1830, the prevail- 
ing influence here was one of skepticism. A powerful religious awakening 
under the preaching of Charles G. Finney, that lion-like reformer, brought 
the leading young merchants and physicians and lawyers into the churches, 
and the whole character of Rochester was changed. These young men grew 
up to be the leaders in every moral reform and in every religious movement 
of the generation that followed. — It was a remarkable instance, as I think, 
of the wide and almost incalculable results of good that may follow a single 
work of God's grace, and the labors of a single preacher, during the formative 
period of a city's history. And here, since then, there have been times when 
the Spirit of God has seemed to sweep down upon the whole community 
and to shake the very foundations of the place, as he did in the days of the 



* An Address of Welcome, at the meeting of the Inter-Seminary Missionary 
Alliance, Rochester, October, 18S5. 

387 



388 THE THEOLOGY OF MISSIONS. 

apostles. May God grant that such days may come again, and that your 
meeting with us may be the beginning of them. 

We give you fair notice that we expect to get more from you than we give, 
although we give you all we can. I do not believe that the twelve apostles 
could have met together after Pentecost, to consult about their work, with- 
out leaving a blessing behind them. And I know that, as you come in the 
Spirit of Christ to ask what he will have you do, your debates and your 
decisions, your conversation and your example, will be a stimulus and inspi- 
ration, not only to all our students, but to all our friends. For I do not 
doubt that Christ himself has come with you, and that many a man, who«e 
zeal and devotion were waning, will here be renewed in the spirit of his 
mind, and will go back to his work with the heroic determination to take 
his life in his hand and go far hence to the heathen. 

We only need to look face to face at the facts of Christianity and of mis- 
sions, to be stirred in our inmost being. Paradoxical as it may seem, mis- 
sions are the greatest argument for Christianity, and Christianity is the 
greatest argument for missions. Missions are the distinctive mark of 
Christianity, as they are not of any other religion. Buddhism, it is true. Id 
to a certain extent a missionary religion, and that because of the one grain 
of truth that mingles with its mass of error — the truth that knowledge and 
morality are not for a select caste, but for all. But the morality of Bud- 
dhism revolves around self, not around God. It has no organizing principle, 
— for it recognizes no God, no inspiration, no soul, no salvation, no personal 
immortality. Salvation is not from sin, but from desire, — and from this men 
can escape only by fleeing from life itself. Mohammedanism is in some 
sense a missionary religion, and that because of its one grain of truth- — the 
oneness and spirituality of God. But Mohammedanism does not base mor- 
ality on love. It conquers only by force. It does not convert either mind 
or heart. Both Buddhism and Mohammedanism appeal to immoral prin- 
ciples of human nature, — the one to the disposition to fly from evil instead 
of overcoming it ; the other to the disposition to seek sensuous happiness as 
the chief end of life. 

But Christian missions present to us the spectacle of men who do not flee 
from evil, but set out to conquer it, and to conquer it in the strength of God ; 
of men who do this, not by violence, but in the power of love ; not for the 
sake of sensuous happiness, but solely for the sake of Christ and the souls 
he died to save. The lives of Reginald Heber and Adoniram Judson and 
David Livingstone are the most devoted, the most pathetic, the most inspir- 
ing, the most sublime, that history can show. Take away the record of 
missionary lives and our conception of humanity is at once narrowed and 
lowered. But all the lives of modern missionaries are only copies in mini- 
ature — aye, even the life of Paul himself is only a copy in miniature; — of the 
life. of Jesus Christ, the great preacher and the great missionary. 

As missions are the greatest arguments for Christianity, missions show us 
what Christianity really is. If we can find out what it is that missionaries 
have preached, what has been the inspiration of their lives, what they have 
found the means of reclaiming and recreating the degraded and the lost, we 
may be pretty sure that that is Christianity, and that this Christianity is 
from God. Now I am certain that missions, as a matter of fact, have been 



THE THEOLOGY OF MISSIONS. 3S9 

based upon an unwavering confidence in four fundamental doctrines, namely, 
first, the universal depravity and guilt of men ; secondly, the substitutionary 
sacrifice of the Son of God to save them ; thirdly, that this life only is the 
time to accept God's plan of mercy; fourthly, that the heathen are lost 
unless we carry to them the gospel. These faiths are still the sinews of 
missionary effort. Take one of them away and the impulse to missions 
ceases. If missions are from God, then these doctrines are from God, — for 
without them missions are impossible. And so, missions become an argu- 
ment for Christianity,- — not only for Christianity in general, but for its 
particular doctrines of sin, and atonement, of probation limited to this life, 
and of condemnation for all who are out of Christ. 

But if missions are an argument for Christianity, Christianity is no less 
an argument for missions. If the gospel be true, then the only true object 
of life is to further Christ's plan of saving the world. If Christ has saved 
us, then the only fit return we can make is to give ourselves to him to be 
used in his service. But more than all else, the love of Christ constraineth 
us. That great love of his awakens responsive love in our hearts, and that 
love, once aroused, goes out toward that whole humanity which he took into 
union with himself, and which he died to save. Apart from Christ, there is 
no disposition toward missions, — to the mere philosopher the heathen do 
not seem worth the saving. But love for Christ is inseparable from love for 
men. And here for each of us comes the test of character. I remember 
well when I stood where you now stand. I had entered upon a course of 
theological study. I had in view the ministry of the gospel. But I was 
fresh from the competitions and emulations of college life. The ministry 
was to me an opportunity of doing good, but it was also a profession. 
Standing, honor, comfort, the gratification of intellectual tastes, the love for 
public address, were unconsciously strong motives and influences within me. 
One day I asked myself: "Do you love Christ enough to go to the Hotten- 
tots for him? And if you do not, what business have you to preach here, or 
anywhere else?" Then began a struggle, as painful and intense as any that 
I knew at my conversion. I found no rest for my soul until I was able to 
say: "Yes, I will go anywhere for Christ. I will count it an honor and a 
joy to tell the Hottentots the story of him who died for them." God did 
not so honor me. Health failed, and my work opened to me here at home. 
But that consecration was one of the epochs of my life. The mission-call 
was the test of my Christian character. If I had not responded rightly, I do 
not see what right I should have had to enter the ministry, or to call myself 
by the name of Christ at all. 

The mission-call is the test of Christian character, both for the ministry 
and for the church. I most devoutly pray that here in these" meetings that 
mission-call may be heard by every one of you. When the prophet Isaiah 
had revealed to him the burning glory of God's throne and the seraphim that 
evermore cry, "Holy! holy! holy!" before it, he felt the contrast between 
that holiness and his own sin, and falling prostrate in the dust he uttered 
the leper's cry, "Unclean! unclean!" But then a live coal from the altar 
of sacrifice touched his lips, his iniquity was taken away and his sin purged ; 
and when the voice of God came to him, "Whom shall I send, and who will 
go for us?" the prophet answered: "Here am I, send me!" May God so 



390 THE THEOLOGY OF MISSIONS. 

reveal here the glory of his justice and his grace, that each one of you shall 
hear God's call, and shall answer: "I will go — here am I — send me — 
wherever I can do the most to honor Christ and to save mankind." 

God puts his ministers and his churches through long processes of prepa- 
ration, — but results come often in an instant of time. He works through 
evolution in the ages of geology and in the ages of history. I'rov lence 
moves through time, says Guizot, as the gods of Homer moved through 
space, — it takes one step and ages have past away. With the Lord a thou- 
sand years are as one day. But let us not forget the complementary truth. 
God is transcendent as well as immanent. He is not shut up to evolution. 
He can cut short his work of righteousness in sudden judgment ; he can cut 
short his work of grace in sudden visitations of his power and glory. Nature 
is the living garment of the Deity, but God can thrust aside that garment 
and make bare his arm. He can condense the substance of a life-time into 
one hour's decision, and initiate an age-long movement of his kingdom in a 
single day. It is just as true that one day is with the Lord as a thousand 
years, as it is that a thousand years are with him as one day. 

Oh that this body of young men, with their vigor and enthusiasm, might 
have the faith that will make this gathering a time of the right hand of the 
Most High, a time of the revelation of God's will, a time of new enduing 
with power from on high, a time of entrance upon new enterprises for the 
glory of his name, a time of everlasting decisions, a time when years are 
crowded into hours ! It took many years to tunnel and drill that rock at 
Hellgate that raised its head in the face of commerce and obstructed the free 
flowing of the tide. But at the last it was the touch of a little child that set 
at liberty all that imprisoned power and blew nine acres of rock into the air. 
My young friends, there is gunpowder in you which can accomplish a great 
deal, if it is only touched with the divine fire, — dynamite in you that can 
blow up the rocky foundations of Satan's throne, if it only came into contact 
with the electric energy of the living God. It is the touch of a childlike 
faith that brings the two — man's will and God's will — together. If you 
have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, you shall say to this mountain, Be 
thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea, — and it shall obey you. Yes, 
every mountainous obstacle, within us or without, that obstructs the progress 
of God's kingdom, may be removed, aye, may be removed more quickly 
than we know, if we only have faith. May God give you all this faith, that 
this meeting may witness a blowing to fragments, a sweeping away forever, 
of some mighty obstacle to the progress of God's kingdom, either in your 
own souls or in the world outside of you. So may the Hellgate of ambition 
and unbelief within, or of human and Satanic opposition without, be 
changed by God's power into a very Heaven-gate through which the flood- 
tide of God's salvation may flow to us and to the world. 



XXXIX. 
THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE CHERUBIM." 



Even in the first pages of the book of Genesis, we find that beautiful 
combination of justice and mercy which makes the Bible a perfect revela- 
tion. There is threatening here, but there is promise also, — not far from 
every curse you will find the announcement of a blessing. By the dim light 
of these early records, we can see that the picture of God's character drawn 
for the childhood of the race was symmetrical and true, — the main features 
were there, and all later revelations have only more perfectly displayed and 
unfolded them. 

He is very far from the truth who supposes that the religion of mankind 
had its origin only in human fears, — even the preparatory dispensations 
were full of comfort and promise. Man's sin had opened a Pandora's box 
of ills, and had sent them forth to desolate the world, but hope was still 
suffered to remain. On the one hand, the curse was alleviated by being 
made the occasion of incidental blessing. The necessity of labor, which 
seemed so hard at first, was made the means of developing human resources 
and ensuring human progress, while it restrained in no small degree the 
growth of human sin. The supreme sorrow of woman was made her honor, 
— she who had brought sin into the world and all our woe, was permitted to 
bring into the world its Savior and to transmit to all generations the bless- 
ings of his salvation. Even the gloom of death was lighted up when it 
became to the righteous the gateway of escape from the toils and sorrows of 
life, and of entrance upon a happ'er and holier state of being. 

But besides these incidental blessings which were made by divine mercy 
to alleviate the terrors of the sentence against sin, a still greater blessing 
was bestowed in the assurance that sin itself should be finally done away. 
This assurance was given in direct promise. The serpent should be crushed, 
bruised, trampled in the dust by the woman's seed, — all subjection to him 
should cease. — complete victory over all his arts and powers should be 
achieved. It was given, too, in symbol. The skins of animals offered in 
sacrifice, with which it is more than probable that our first parents were 
clothed by God, afforded a beautiful type of that divine righteousness, 
secured only by the death of another, with which God would clothe their 
guilty souls. And yet another symbolic lesson of hope and comfort was 
given in the Cherubim, which were stationed at the entrance of Eden, after 
man was banished from the garden. 

With regard to the meaning of these mysterious forms, there has been 



• A sermon upon the text, Genesis 3: 24 — "So he drove out the man, and 
he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword 
which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." 

391 






392 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE CHERUBIM. 

the greatest diversity of opinion. Yet, amid the multitude of explanations, 
I am satisfied that there is one which not only harmonizes the Scriptural 
accounts, but furnishes important practical instruction. In considering this 
difficult subject — the nature and purpose of the cherubim — let us first free 
ourselves from certain common misconceptions of the narrative in Genesis. 
You remember that man, having disobeyed his Creator, and having set 
himself in opposition to the will of God, came to know good only by the 
loss of it, and to know evil by sad and bitter experience. Since he had for- 
saken God, the source of life, he was driven forth from "the tree of life," 
and "the land of life." "And God placed at the east of the garden of 
Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the 
way of the tree of life." 

The common impression with regard to this passage is that the cherubim 
are executors of the divine vengeance, and that they stand at the gates of 
Eden brandishing the sword of flame, and barring all return. This is nearly 
the view which Milton takes in the closing lines of Paradise Lost; there 
the sinning pair, 

" Hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, 
Through Eden take their solitary way," 

" And looking back, all the eastern side behold 
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, 
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate 
With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms." 

But a slight examination of the text suffices to show that the sword and the 
cherubim are not necessarily connected, as both of them and equally mani- 
festations of divine wrath, — they are rather placed side by side as distinct 
and separate symbols, — while the word which describes their office is a word 
capable of double meaning, and admits the supposition that the purpose of 
the cherubim, and the purpose of the sword, were radically different. 

There is nothing in this text of Genesis to forbid our believing that in 
these symbolic forms of sword and cherubim, stationed at the entrance of 
Eden, we have an example of that constant juxtaposition of the emblems of 
justice and mercy which meets us throughout the Bible. The establishment 
of this view will occupy us further on. It is sufficient here to say, that I 
find in the flaming sword the emblem of God's avenging justice, — and in 
this its whole meaning is exhausted. The cherubim, on the other hand, 
were meant, as I believe, not to terrify, but to inspire with hope. The 
sword meant judgment only, — the cherub-forms meant mercy. Even in 
driving forth his creatures from Paradise, God did not manifest himself in 
unmitigated wrath, nor send them forth into a rayless gloom of toil and 
suffering and death. As our first parents turned sorrowfully to take one 
last passionate look at the home of their innocence, never more to be theirs 
on earth, they saw the flaming sword indeed,- — that told them of injured 
holiness forbidding all approach, — but side by side with that flame-like 
sward, were the glorious figures of the cherubim, teaching them that the 
Paradise they had lost should be reserved for them, until they should return 
to it again, fitted for more exalted enjoyments and possessed of a more per- 
fect nature than they had before the fall. The cherubim were not vague 
images of terror, but symbols of mercy and restoration, inspiring the exiled 



THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE CHERUBIM. 393 

pair with hope and courage. The sword was the image of justice, keeping 
the way of the tree of life from unholy man. The cherubim were the 
image of mercy, keeping the way of the tree of life for man, when once he 
should be redeemed and perfected by God's discipline of grace, — and hold- 
ing out to him, amidst his woe, the promise of a Paradise Regained. 

This passage in Genesis, taken by itself, throws but little light upon the 
form of the cherubim. There is no description of them, — it is taken for 
granted, indeed, that the figures are already known. The etymology of the 
word "cherub" is involved in hopeless obscurity. We are left to the inti- 
matious of other parts of Scripture, therefore, for almost all our knowledge 
respecting them. There are, fortunately, three other places in the sacred 
record where these symbolic forms appear. In the 25th chapter of Exodus, 
Mosea is directed to make two golden cherubim, one at each end of the 
mercy-seat in the holy of holies. The two are to look toward each other 
and toward the mercy-seat, where the divine glory was manifested and 
the Almighty made his throne. But even in the narrative of the book of 
Exodus, so full of detailed description of the tabernacle and all its furni- 
ture, there is almost complete silence respecting the object or appearance 
of these figures of gold. Nothing is told us of their structure, except that 
they had wings stretched forth on high which covered the mercy-seat, and 
faces bent downwards, it may be, in the attitude of adoration. 

Pass on, then, from book to book of the Old Testament, and you find no 
other description, until you reach Ezekiel's visions of what he calls "the 
living creatures," in the first and tenth chapters of his prophecy. He beholds 
four glorious forms, each having four faces and four wings. Only one of 
these faces is the face of man, — the three others are the faces respectively 
of an ox, a lion, and an eagle. Each one of these living creatures has the 
hands of a man. Immense revolving wheels are underneath each one, carry- 
ing them, with the speed of a meteor-flash, wherever they will go. These 
four bear aloft a sapphire pavement upon which rests a throne, — and upon 
the throne sits God himself. This description of the living creatures of 
Ezekiel's vision is connected with the earlier part of our investigation by a 
single sentence of the prophet, which reads: "And I knew that they were 
the cherubim," — those sacred figures, namely, with which he had been 
familiar when performing his duties as priest in the temple. The living 
creatures and the cherubim, therefore, are one and the same. 

From this point we must take a long leap before we find another reference 
to them, and when we find it, it is the last of all, and in the last book of the 
Bible. In the Revelation of John, we read of the "four beasts" that worship 
and adore in the innermost circle of heaven. Consult the original, and you 
find that this word "beasts" is an utter mistranslation. The word is the 
same as that translated "living creatures" in Ezekiel. Not only is the same 
name applied to them, but there is a remarkable similarity of description. 
The same composite forms appear in the Revelation that meet us in Ezekiel's 
prophecy, but each has not four faces as there. Yet each has a face after 
one of the four types, — there is one face of an ox, one of an eagle, one of a 
lion, and one of a man. Here too, the number of wings is not four but six. 
In Ezekiel's vision, the wheels are full of eyes, — here there are no wheels, 
but the living creatures themselves, around and within, are full of eyes. 



394 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE CHERUBIM. 

There can be little question, then, that the cherubim of the tabernacle and 
temple, the living creatures of Ezekiel, and the hymning 'beasts" of the 
Revelation, are one and the same symbol. 

From these Biblical descriptions certain deductions may be drawn, which 
may gradually open to us the design and nature of the cherubim. First, 
then, the cherubim are artificial, temporary, symbolic figures, — not actual, 
personal, eternal existences. They are not personal beings, of a higher 
order than man, ranging with archangels and the principalities of heaven, — 
but they are rather types and representations of spiritual existence. This 
we may infer from tb«* fact that they assume different shapes and appear- 
ances, according to the ends to be attained by their appearances, each having 
variously four faces or one face, six wings or four wings, a multitude of eyes, 
or none at all. They appear, tco, only at times when God is speaking in the 
language of symbol, as in the visions of John and Ezekiel, over the mercy- 
seat, or at the gates of Eden. They never speak to men nor hold commu- 
nication with men. Their whole aim seems accomplished, when they have 
once set forth the idea of an existence near to God, and subservient to his 
will. 

Secondly, while they are not themselves personal existences, they are sym- 
bols of personal existence — symbols not of divine nor angelic perfections, 
but of human nature. Two main facts make it clear that they are emblems 
of human nature. On the one hand the predominating appearance of them, 
as Ezekiel tells us, is that of a man. Their upright posture and gestures 
indicate that the body is human. There are the hands of a man under their 
wings. In Revelation, though only one of them had the face of a man, all 
four had a human body. In truth, all the descriptions agree with the proph- 
et's words: "And this was their appearance — they had the likeness of a 
man." Another fact, and one which furnishes the key to the whole mystery, 
is given us by John. We read that the four living creatures with the four 
and twenty elders, fall down before the Lamb, having every one of them 
harps and golden bowls full of odors, — and thus prostrate before the throne, 
they sing this new song: "Thou art worthy to take the book and to open 
the seals thereof, for thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy 
blood, and hast made us unto our God kings and priests, and we shall reign 
on the earth." This is the song of the redeemed. Can it be the song of 
angels or archangels? Has Christ been slain for the redemption of angels? 
Let the author of the epistle to the Hebrews answer: "Verily, he took not 
on him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of Abraham." 
Moreover we have only to look a few verses further in the Revelation, and 
we find that the song of the angels is a totally distinct and separate one — 
a song in which there is no note of praise like this: "Thou hast redeemed 
ms to God by thy blood, and hast made us kings and priests unto God, and 
we shall reign on the earth." This is the new song of redeemed humanity, 
which "none can learn except those who have been redeemed from the 
earth." 

In this reference to the book of Revelation, I have followed the Author- 
ized Version, in spite of the fact that the Revised Version omits the word 
"us," and substitutes In italics the word "men" — a change which might 
intimate that the cherubim do not identify themselves with redeemed 



THE NATURE AND PUlirOSE OF THE CHERUBIM. 39.3 

humanity. The reading of tho Authorized Version has better textual sup- 
port, and has the advantage of assigning an object to the verb "redeemed," 
while the text followed by the Revised Version gives the verb no expressed 
object, but is obliged, in a somewhat unnatural way, to supply one. I 
regard the view I have propounded as the most probable one, apart from 
the testimony of this particular passage, — with this passage, it appears to 
me to have the force of demonstration. Over against the view we adopt, 
however, — the view that the cherubim are symbols of redeemed humanity 
— there stands another view which I must mention, this, namely, that the 
cherubim are symbols of nature, as pervaded by the divine energy and 
as subordinated to the divine purpose. Those who hold this view would 
say that in the cherubim the world of nature, including both the material 
and the brute creation, is represented as praising God. I am persuaded that 
this view may be combined with the one I have been advocating, and only 
by so enlarging it can it be made consistent or intelligible. For how can 
nature ever find a voice, except in redeemed humanity? Man, as having a 
physical organism, is a part of nature ; as having a soul, he emerges from 
nature, and can speak, as nature of herself never could. Only through man, 
is nature, otherwise blind and dumb and dead, able to appreciate and express 
the Creator's glory. The cherubim then are symbols of redeemed man, in 
his two-fold capacity of image of God and as priest of nature. Not in soul 
only, but in body also, does he speak forth God's praise, and only as 
redeemed humanity thus praises God does the material universe give glory 
to him who made it. 

But, thirdly, the cherubim are emblems of human nature, not in its pres- 
ent stage of development, but possessed of all its original perfections. For 
this reason the most perfect animal forms are combined with that of man. 
The Jewish proverb ran: "There are four highest in the world — the lion 
among the beasts, the ox among cattle, the eagle among birds, man among 
all creatures, — but God is supreme over all." These cherubic forms 
combine the excellencies of these four chiefs of God's terrestrial creation. 
Before the fall, it may be, man possessed these excellencies in a far higher 
degree, and so was lord of the animal creation, himself being the climax of 
creaturely perfection. But his sin deprived him of this high place. The 
animal world emancipated itself from his dominion, and now the ox, the 
lion, the eagle, all have powers which man has not in the same perfection. 
We see then that though the essential nature of man is highest of all, yet it 
might be greatly elevated and ennobled by superadding to it the qualities 
typified in these animal forms. To symbolize perfected human nature every 
creature perfection on earth must be comprehended and combined with his 
own. To superadd to his own perfections those of the animal kingdom is 
not to degrade but to exalt him — to picture him indeed in that original 
supremacy in which 'all things are put under his feet, all sheep and oxen, 
yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, 
and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas." 

Add then to human nature all the lionlike qualities — kinglike majesty 
and peerless strength, undaunted courage and glowing zeal, innate magna- 
nimity and nobleness of spirit, royal superiority to the petty and the mean, 
secure and triumphant carelessness of every foe. Take your weak and timid 



396 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE CHERUBIM. 

Christian and endow him with those qualities, and lo ! a Knox or a Luther. 
The lion is the king among beasts. Engraved on the throne of Solomon, it 
has been the emblem of royalty ever since. What does it mean here among 
these cherubic forms, but an intimation of the kingly dignity and courage 
and strength that belong to the unfallen sons of God. — What now are the 
qualities of the ox? We at once count among them, patient labor, product- 
ive energy, meek submission to the yoke, unwearied and useful service. 
Hence the ox was placed higher than the horse, and in Egypt the home and 
mother-land of symbols, was even made an object of worship. Take now 
your vacillating, inconstant, labor-hating, self-willed, useless Christian, — 
add to him the ox -like qualities, — lo ! you have a Howard or a Harlan Page. 
And what is the meaning of this symbol here, if not that our human nature, 
as one of its proper perfections, must possess the spirit of humble yet rest- 
less service which they display who rest not night or day in their heavenly 
service of ministration and of worship? — Then, too, the eagle, marvelous 
for vision and for flight, — able, according to the ancient notions, to see fish 
in the sea from the greatest heights, and to gaze undazzled on the sun. The 
epithet eagle-eyed is too graphic to need an explanation, even to the com- 
monest mind. In the Revelation, the fourth face was that of a "flying 
eagle," bringing to our thoughts the ancient declaration that no bird can 
fly so far or so high. How vivid an image of an active, vigilant, fervent, 
soaring spirit, prompting the readiest and swiftest execution of the divine 
behests, and lifting the soul up from the low concerns of sense to the insight 
and contemplation of divine and spiritual glories. Take now your earthly- 
minded, short-sighted, narrow-hearted Christian, and add to him these qual- 
ities of spiritual flight and vision, — and lo ! a St. John or a Fenelon stands 
before you. What does the eagle symbolize, but the fact that to human 
nature, in its truest, noblest development, belong an insight into divine 
realities and a soaring of the spirit into the regions of divine communion, 
of which we get here only the rare and rapturous foretastes. Take man — ■ 
even redeemed man in his present state — and give him the qualities typified 
by all these animal forms, — then add reason, conscience, will, affection, 
raised each to their highest powers attainable, — and how magnificent is the 
sum ! 

But, fourthly, these cherubic forms represent not merely material or 
earthly perfections, but are emblems of human nature spiritualized and 
sanctified. It is important to observe that the term "living creatures" is 
used more than thirty times in Ezekiel and Revelation to describe them. 
We cannot fail to see that life in its highest state of power and activity is 
indicated as their essential characteristic. And the descriptions of the pro- 
phetic visions bear out this inference. They are creatures instinct with life. 
The wheels in Ezekiel, and their whole bodies in Revelation, are full of eyes 
— the symbol of intelligent life. "The spirit of the living creature," we 
read, "was in the wheels, "■ — they communicated life to things else inani- 
mate. We see in them a quick and restless activity, — they run and return 
with lightning speed, — their wings, ever outstretched, indicate incessant 
motion. They represent that humanity in which Christ's purpose is accom- 
plished, that it might have life and have it more abundantly. Yet this life 
is not physical alone or chiefl}* — but spiritual. It is holy life as opposed 



TIIE NATURE AND PURFOSE OF THE CHERUBIM. 397 

to sin, the death of the soul. They made no crooked paths for their feet, 
but every one, as the prophet tells us, went straight forward. And they had 
no need to turn, in order to move in the path of rectitude, for there were 
wheels beneath each one which crossed one another transversely, so that, in 
whichever direction the cherub would move, in that direction the swiftly 
revolving wheels were ready to carry him. They move too on God's errands, 
obeying instantly the voice from above the throned firmament of sapphire 
blue. If they represent human nature, it must be a human nature perfectly 
subject to the divine will, and executing the divine commands. We cannot 
bring before our imagination the scene in the Apocalypse and the unceasing 
worship of the divine perfections, nor the scene in the prophet's vision, 
where the reflection from them of the divine glory is intolerable to mortal 
eyes, without seeing in them the symbols of a human nature not only 
restored to its original purity, but possessed at length of a holiness and 
beauty far surpassing that which was Inst by the fall. 

Fifthly, these figures set forth, in type and shadow, a human nature ex- 
alted to be the dwelling place of God. For the cherubim dwell in the Imme- 
diate presence of God. Not only was the tabernacle God's habitation and 
their habitation, and so the whole of the curtains forming the interior of 
the tent were interwoven with cherubic figures, but they dwelt close to thp 
very throne of God, on the mercy-seat. There, between the cherubim, was 
the seat of the commonwealth of Israel. There God manifested his glory. 
There was the place of the "Shekinah." And there, in the very blaze of 
the divine glory, and with faces turned towards it as witnesses of the divine 
glory, were the cherubim. Aye, they not only dwell with God and are eye 
witnesses of his majesty, but God dwells in them. The living creatures in 
Ezekiel are pervaded, not with a self-fed and self -originated life, but it is 
God's life that flows through them and manifests itself in them. And the 
cherubim of the Revelation are not of any outer circle of worshipers, but 
appear in the midst of the throne. What is this, but the glorious prophecy 
of a human nature perfectly restored and transcendently exalted, — made 
one again with God and made the dwelling place of God, — rescued forever 
from the curse and stain of sin, filled once more with the divine life, seated 
on the throne with Christ, clothed with a glory and beauty that reflect the 
glory and beauty of God, and so, endowed with privileges and elevated to 
dignities infinitely greater than those over whose loss the race of man has 
shed so many and so bitter tears ! 

Apply these conclusions now to the passage before us. What was the 
special meaning of the cherubim at the gates of Eden, when man was driven 
out for his sin? I answer, they taught our first parents, and they teach us, 
that Paradise, though lost, is still reserved for man. The cherubim were 
stationed there to occupy, until man should be ready to return. Just that 
imagery was employed w T hich would waken in him a just and true view of 
God. Terror and repulsion were not the emotions which God desired in 
this child just banished from his Father's house. The sword was needed 
there, to vindicate God's holiness and show the guilt of sin, but an image of 
mercy and hope was needed also. When Adam looked back towards the 
entrance of his lost Eden, the sword indeed awed him, but these living 
forms, made in his own mould, yet endowed with exalted beauties and capa- 



SOS THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE CHERUBIM. 

bilities, these indicated to him that Paradise was not blotted out of ex- 
istence, nor given to beings of another order and sphere, but was still 
reserved for him in God's mercy. Earthly forms like his own still held it. 
The region of life was not lost to man forever. Human nature was yet 
destined to regain the lost Paradise. 

Again, these figures taught Adam, and the early races of mankind, that 
Paradise could only be regained by man's return to holiness and divine 
communion. Hence the forms were not common forms of humanity, but 
ideal forms, exalted representations of human nature, fit to dwell in closest 
intimacy with God, pervaded by his life and reflecting his glory- The great 
lesson was taught, that holiness must come before blessedness, and that man 
shall regain his lost estate when he has nothing to fear from the divine 
justice. The promise of restoration shall be fulfilled, not by the surrender 
of the divine righteousness, but by providing for its exercise while the 
creature is notwithstanding saved. In o;her words, salvation is from God, 
yet salvation shall not obscure, but glorify and honor, the divine justice. 

With this symbolic promise, too, of a rightly restored and sanctified 
human nature, was combined the promise that the Paradise Regained 
should be more glorious than the Paradise Lost. Not only should there 
be life instead of death, fellowship instead of estrangement, love instead 
of hostility, purity in place of pollution, but all these blessings should be 
large and abundant beyond all human experience or comprehension. The 
recovery should not be partial, but complete and more than complete, — 
nay, the powers of sin should be so vanquished, and the plans of the adver- 
sary so outwitted, that God's grace should get greater glory and the human 
race greater blessedness, than could have been without the fall. So not 
man's effort or deserts, but God's almighty and conquering grace, shall be 
magnified in the admission of the creature to a closer relation to God, and 
a participation in grander sights and ministrations than were ever known 
under the original constitution of things. How much of all this symbolism 
was understood by our first parents, we cannot know ; but this we may 
believe, that in the light of the promise, and under the scrutiny of keener 
intuitions than ours, both they and the earliest members of a believing seed 
found in it a hope and comfort which mere words could never have given. 
Aye, I love to fancy, that under the inward teachings of God's spirit, the 
first Adam amid his sorrow and weariness had some glimpses, at least, of 
the land of rest which only the second Adam fully revealed to the world, 
and that in spirit, if not in words, he sang: 

" There happier bowers than Eden's bloom, 
Nor sin nor sorrow know ; 
Blest seats, — through rude and stormy seas, 
I onward press to you! " 

Yet doubtless much was left to be unfolded in the progress of God's reve- 
lation. As man comes nearer and nearer to occupying the high position 
typified by the cherubim, his knowledge of divine mysteries grows also. 
And this growing nearness to the divine, and consequent nearness to the 
Paradisaic state, seems to be symbolized in the varying relations of man to 
these cherubic forms. At the expulsion from Eden, the region of holy life 
was shut to men of flesh and blood, and none could approach the cherubim. 



THE NATURE AND TURPOSE OF THE CHERUBIM. 399 

.But in the tabernacle, the human and earthly won a greater nearness to the 
divine, and in the person of the high priest, men could approach to the very 
feet of the cherubim of glory. In Ezekiel, the favorite of God is admitted 
to a still grander and more open view of God's glory. In the early visions 
of the Apocalypse, man has reached the very place of the cherubim, — the 
type and the antitype meet and mingle, — the elders who are the select 
ones of the church, and the cherubim which only symbolize the church, are 
together in the midst of the throne. But now, when man once fallen has 
been led by the Lamb to the very height and pinnacle of created being, the 
cherubim, having served their purpose as foreshadowings of that exalted 
state, disappear and vanish away. In the last visions of Revelation, amid 
the most glowing descriptions of the heavenly glories and the heavenly 
inhabitants, these symbolic forms are seen no longer. Since man has at 
length reentered the long lost Eden, and now eats of the tree of life which 
yields twelve manner of fruits and whose leaves are for the healing of the 
nations, the cherubim keep the way of the tree of life no longer, for Para- 
dise is regained, and the promise is fulfilled. 

These mysterious forms were indeed but symbols — symbols that were 
lower and less than the realities they symbolized. It would be childish to 
imagine, then, that they illustrate to us what our future bodies will be. We 
are not to have forms like those of the cherubim, but we are to have all the 
glorious qualities of heart and mind and soul which they typified, and these 
very figures may assure us that whatever may be lacking to us here will be 
supplied there. How grand an object of contemplation is the glory that 
yet waits to be revealed ! That heavenly knowledge, power, holiness, — 
that fullness of spiritual life of which the kingly energy of the lion, the 
unwearied service of the ox, the soaring flight of the eagle, are but poor 
symbols, — that nearness to God and that sight of his glory which John and 
Ezekiel faintly pictured, are not these the only fit objects of ambition? Do 
they not dwarf our highest conceptions of human destiny? Yes, it was for 
this imperial greatness that man was made, and if we forget it, we forget 
it to our sorrow. Earthly glories fade, but the glory of a human soul that 
has grown up in all things into Christ fades never. Who of us shall be 
kings and priests unto God? Who of us shall shine as the brightness of 
the sun forever and ever? Who shall cry, like the burning ones before the 
throne: "Holy! holy! holy!" Ah, it shall not be the great, the rich, the 
proud, the wise, of the earth, unless they can sing before the Lamb, 'Thou 
hast redeemed us to God by thy blood." Those only shall reach the sum- 
mit of heavenly glory and felicity, who have bowed here in humility and 
penitence at the foot of the Savior's cross. Who of us shall dwell forever 
with God, — and who of us shall dwell in everlasting burnings? Both dwell- 
ing-places are offered to us, — God offers one, — the devil offers the other. 
Choose ye this day I 



XL. 
WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK.* 



This word of God, which comes echoing down to us from our long-lost 
Faradise, is the key-word to the whole enigma of woman's place and work. 
It was uttered before temptation and sin had disordered human relations, 
before selfishness and transgression had blinded man to the natural rights 
of woman, before the curse had turned associations of joy into a source of 
bitterness and trial. It tells us what God intended woman to be, what he 
originally fitted her to be, what it is her true nature to be, what she would 
have been if the race had not fallen, what she will be in just the degree to 
which the race is restored. And if our highest glory in this earthly life is 
to be what God intended us to be, and to accomplish the work which he 
sent us into the world to do, it is certainly wise for woman to compare her 
own nature with the divine descriptions of it, and strive to realize to the 
utmost the ideal of her character and work that exists in the mind of God. 

What then was the Paradisaic state of woman? I answer: she was the 
"help meet of man," or as it is more accurately translated "a helper over 
against him," — evidently signifying a helper suitable for him, corresponding 
to him, one like him in person, disposition, affection, united to him by the 
tenderest ties, always present before him to aid, sympathize, and comfort, 
and yet not the same but different, the counterpart, the complement, the 
converse of himself. And if you read onward a few verses, you find that, 
when God brings to man his new created companion and bestows her upon 
him in the bonds of the marriage covenant, Adam receives her, not as his 
slave, not as his fellow simply, but as a part of himself, giving her a name 
taken from his own name, and engaging to cleave unto her iu a perpetual 
union of sympathy and affection. In these simple statements, we have the 
whole Scriptural doctrine of woman's proper and normal condition. And 
that doctrine may be summed up in three particulars : 1st, Equality with 
man in nature ; 2ndly, Subordination to man in office ; 3rdly, Union with 
man in life and work. 

Let me make these three particulars somewhat plainer. First, Woman is 
the equal of man in nature. She has the same humanity, — the same divine 
hand formed her. She is not the creature of man, but the creature of God, 
— and God set her over against man as his counterpart, his complement, his 
second self. The words "over Against man," while they imply that she is 
not the same with man, but different from him, just as plainly imply that 
her nature is in no respect inferior to his. The equality between them is an 



* A sermon preached in the First Baptist Church, Rochester, July 21. 
1S78, on the text, Genesis 2: 18 — "And the Lord God said: It is not good 
that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him." 

400 



WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK. 



401 



equality of value, but not an equality of identity. Secondly, She is subor- 
dinate to man in office. She is to be helper, not principal. Therefore man 
bas precedence in the order of creation, — woman is made of man, and to 
supply the felt need of man. The race, therefore, is called the race of man, 
not the race of woman. Man, superior not at all in his essential nature, has 
yet a superiority in office. His it is to subdue the world and govern it, — and 
woman's office is the subordinate one of being man's helper, man's furnisher, 
man's inspirer. But thirdly, This subordination of woman to man in office, 
works no degradation to her, but constitutes her truest glory. For, in her 
office of helper, she is no servant. She stands, not beneath, but side by side. 
Aye, she is one with him in life and work — her equal influence penetrating 
and pervading his — her soul possessing and appropriating all his joys and 
all his conquests. The two are one. They each give up personal prefer- 
ences for the common weal. The personal liberty of the man is restrained 
as much as that of the woman, — neither can go where they like. The man 
serves the woman, as really as the woman serves the man. — there is no 
slavery, for when was it heard of that a master worked for the support of 
his slave, and not the slave for the support of his master? Man gives her 
his name and they are one in law thenceforth, not because of any trampling 
under foot of her rights, or annihilation of her personality, but because she 
is actually one with her husband, having her interests common with his. 
Woman was once in man as part of his very body, — and that original unity 
is shadowed forth in the oneness of their life and work. 

There is a passage in the New Testament which throws great light upon 
the true character of this relation, and illustrates very perfectly every one of 
the three particulars we have been considering. It is found in the eleventh 
chapter of First Corinthians, where the apostle is speaking of the modesty 
and subordination proper to the female sex. What limitations must be put 
upon the literal interpretation of his command to the women of his day, I 
shall indicate presently. This passage is not affected by them. 'Here I 
would have you know," he says, "that the head of every man is Christ: 
and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God." 
Observe how an analogy is drawn between the relation of man to woman, 
and the relation of God to Christ. Between God and Christ there is perfect 
equality in point of nature, — but, in his office of incarnate Redeemer and 
Savior, Christ was subordinate to the Father. Did this subordination of the 
Son destroy their union or the community of interest between them? Hear 
the Savior say: 'I and my Father are one." So it is the lot of woman, 
that being equal to man in point of nature, she comes, after the example of 
the Son of God. to hold an office of subordination. Not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister, she comes, — in all manner of heipful service proving 
herself to be one with him, and in this humbling of herself finding herself 
most truly exalted. 

You have seen that I have taken God's words with regard to woman before 
the fall, as the standard of appeal in our discussion of her true position. I 
do not consider that the curse pronounced upon woman has anything to do 
with determining her rightful place and work. Even if that curse were an 
arbitrary decree of God, as some so unjustly interpret it, it would be no 
business of ours to execute it. If the slave-holder's ancient but baseless 
26 



402 WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORE.. 

notion that ''Cursed be Canaan" referred to the negro race, what right did 
it give him to kidnap and enslave them? But none of God's curses are 
arbitrary decrees, — they are only prophecies of what will be, and must be, 
the natural results of sin. And when God uttered those words of doom to 
woman: "'I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; In sorrow 
thou shalt bring forth children ; and thy desire shall be unto thy husband, 
and he shall rule over thee," this so-called curse was but the pitiful fore- 
warning of a long course of tyranny and oppression, in which alienation 
from God should bring forth its natural fruits, and the female sex should 
find their pleading love and their longings for sympathy and their aspira- 
tions for better things met too often by imperious contempt and sensual 
degradations. In how many a land and age these predictions of the conse- 
quences of transgression have been verified ! How often women have been 
bought and sold like cattle; how often their very sex has been turned into 
a reproach and stigma ; how often it has been even denied that they had 
souls ! But this is not the sentence of Christianity or the Bible. These 
recognize often the existence of the customs of the day, and dissuade men 
from hasty attempts to break them up, lest the evil be greater than the good. 
So Paul exhorted the Romans to obey Nero instead of rising in insurrection, 
and commanded the Corinthian women not to violate the general sense of 
propriety in the community around them, — but these exhortations ceased 
to be binding when the circumstances which called them forth had changed. 
Both Christianity and the Bible bring in their train the enfranchisement of 
woman and the lifting of the curse. As the curse is only a prediction of 
the natural consequences of sin, wherever the gospel puts an end to men's 
supreme selfishness and love of power there woman escapes from her state 
of slavish subjection, and is recognized as the equal and companion of man. 
The Hindu woman never dares to sit at the same table with her lord, nor 
to walk by his side. Her husband and her sons must eat before her while 
she serves, and she must walk like a slave behind them. Even the Jewish 
Rabbins said, "No man ever salutes a woman," and "He that teaches his 
daughter in the law is as one who plays the fool." Let the women of our day 
thank God for the Bible, and for what it has wrought. Who can doubt that 
it is to accomplish much more, not only in heathen, but in Christian lands, 
until woman reaches the height for which God made her, and becomes in 
the noblest sense the equal and helper of man? The gospel of Christ is to 
abolish the curse at last, and we are to do our part in hastening its abolition. 
With this view, it is our duty to recognize and put away all those relics 
of ancient injustice in our laws and manners which deprive woman of her 
just consideration and of the just rewards of her labor. In all power there 
is a natural tendency to abuse, and there can be little doubt that man's 
power over woman has been often very shamefully and injuriously exercised. 
It is often the case that the laws of a country are palpably unjust, simply 
because they reflect the manners and opinions of an age gone by. There are 
certain provisions in the laws of many of our states which unfairly deprive 
the wife or widow of the control of her property or her children. The 
public sentiment of the day, when once called to act upon these incongrui- 
ties in our legislation, almost invariably rectifies them. There are other 
disabilities which women labor under with regard to education, — the highest 



WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK. 403 

facilities of culture have not been offered to them as freely as to men. There 
are occupations closed to them now, which might well be opened to th^m. 
Steam-working machinery has taken much work out of their hands, and 
nothing has yet been put in its place. The result is that the labor of women 
is confined too much to a narrow range, with all the disadvantages of im- 
mense competition within it. Now, in all these things, our human as well 
as our Christian feeling carries us with the advocates of reform. We thank 
them for bringing these things to our notice, — we bid them God-speed in 
their work, — we assure them of our sympathy and aid in every effort to 
secure to woman the possession of her own property and earnings, the 
development of her powers by the highest education, the opening to her 
of every field of labor or trust which she is fitted to occupy, whether it be 
literature or art, brokerage or medicine, teaching or book-keeping, and the 
right to the same wages which men receive for the same work. There can 
be little doubt that many women have peculiar gifts for work that hitherto 
has been interdicted to them. There are some, unbound by family ties, 
who may do the world mure good by their public teaching', than they could 
do by confining themselves to the common work of women. Exceptional 
as these cases are, and repugnant to our tastes as their course may some- 
times be, we have no right to pass harsh judgment upon them, so long as 
they do not manifestly violate the rules of modesty and subordination laid 
down in the word of God. We may not yet know all that is in woman to do. 
Let us be willing to tolerate many a failure, and to look very kindly upon 
the experiments she makes, for only thus can .aany learn where their real 
strength lies aud what is their true vocation. Let us be willing to accord 
to woman the fullest possible development of her powers, and the widest 
scope for their exercise, consistently with the nature and place that God has 
given her. 

But while we acknowledge that the womanly nature is broader than has 
been supposed, and that it deserves the noblest opportunities for cultivation 
and use, are there no limits to its range? Has womankind the same place 
and work as man ? May she rightly aspire, for example, to the same public 
and political life with man? Here we part company from the modern 
agitators of so-called woman's rights, and declare that nature, as well as the 
Bible, has proclaimed not only woman's equality of nature but her subordi- 
nation in office. I say nature as well as the Bible has proclaimed this, — and 
how? By the simple fact of sex — a fact seldom alluded to in addresses 
upon the platform, and difficult to treat in the pulpit, but a fact completely 
decisive of the whole question. It is too commonly assumed that woman is 
but a sort of undeveloped and suppressed man. Sidney Smith once said that 
if boys and girls were educated alike, they would soon be indistinguishable 
from each other, — a sentiment which shows that wise and witty men can 
sometimes utter things not wise nor witty either. And John Stuart Mill, 
whose book on the Subjection of Women has been the great arsenal from 
which most of the late arguments for woman's suffrage have been drawn, 
treats the whole subject almost as if the distinction of sex did not exist, and 
had no influence of its own on character. Hence he ascribes the general 
condition of subordination, which has prevailed almost without exception 
from the beginning until now, simply to the law of the strongest, by which 



404 WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK. 

the earliest men, seeing the value of women as bond-maids, made them by 
force their slaves. So man, being the stronger, has put woman under his 
heel, and has kept her there ever since. Now we might urge that such an 
explanation of a universal fact from mere superiority of brute force, without 
taking into account the affinities that undoubtedly exist between the sexes, 
is far more incredible and unphilosophical than the Biblical explanation, 
according to which God made the woman by nature a helper, and brought 
her, in accordance with that nature, to the man, — who on his part longed 
for a companion. It forgets the fact that this subordination, with all its 
perversions and abuses on the part of man, has yet been no involuntary 
servitude, but a willing subjection, and the source of many of the purest 
joys of life to scores of generations. And for this office of subordination, 
whether they assent to it or not, women are fitted by their very constitution. 
Woman, in the first place, is of less stature and strength. If measured 
with man according to his own standard, she must be deemed inferior, for 
unless in intelligence and power of will she far excel him, this inferiority 
in physical strength makes her the second, not the first. Then, secondly, 
there is the natural and inborn attraction of the sexes — an attraction whose 
essence consists partly in the love of weakness for courage and strength, 
and the delight of manhood in the protection and upholding of that which 
clings to it for shelter and rest. If you could snap the cords of written 
law all over the globe, — if you could say to every woman; "Your hour of 
freedom has come — assert your right to absolute equality," — you would find 
that, no long time after, society would return to its old ways; the man with 
his strength, going out to earn bread for the family, would, on his return, 
be saluted gladly as its head ; and the wife would delight to serve him. It 
is the man who represents the principle of authority, and it is woman's 
nature to recognize and delight in it. The most high-spirited girl, however 
she may be educated to believe in exaggerated estimates of the rights of 
woman, no sooner falls in love and is married, than all her theories of abso- 
lute equality go to the winds, and in practice she fiuds herself, in her en- 
thusiastic affection, putting herself of her own accord into subjection to her 
husband, "even as Sarah of old obeyed Abraham, calling him lord." And 
this will be so all the more, if the husband refrain from all acts of authority, 
and, instead of assuming the place of superiority, takes only what true 
affection gives him. As oil and water find their places, when mixed to- 
gether, so it will be with every ingenuous wedded pair. 

The conclusions of science, so far as they go, disprove the oft-repeated 
assertion that "the soul has no gender." These differences of sex are most 
essential and radical. They must, and in point of fact they do, wonderfully 
influence character, giving to man the place of force and authority — to the 
woman that of help and submission. But beyond all this, there are peculiar 
liabilities of woman, in her normal state, which necessarily prevent unremit- 
ting labor or public duties of any kind. As the greatest advocate of woman's 
equality with man himself confesses, "Out-door occupations would in any 
event be practically interdicted to the great majority of women." The great 
fault of his discussion, however, is, that woman's nature and woman's special 
work are studiously kept out of sight. The advocates of woman's rights 
are too often silent with regard to that great function of women which con- 



WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK. 405 

stitutes their chief and most important care. A function with which the sex 
at large cannot dispense without being false to the end of their being and 
their mission in the world. There are times when, if they are true women, 
and live the normal and appointed life of women, they must give up outward 
labor, — must give up their preaching, if they are preachers ; the practice or 
study of the professions, if they are engaged in these ; the work of public 
offices, if they are employed there. Children must be born into the world, 
if the world is to go on, — and the best of women must be mothers, if the 
best of men are to fill our places of trust and power. There must be times 
of seclusion, even if they are allowed to enter upon public duties, — and 
then, whether they will or no, they must be dependent upon others. Man's 
life goes on in uninterrupted strength and activity. Theirs has its seasons 
of passivity and weakness. With this necessity upon them, they cannot 
compete with men in the more active callings of life, — or, if they sacrifice 
their motherhood and their womanhood to pursue them, they only lose the 
greater to gain the less. With this greatest and grandest of all human 
works, the bringing-forth and nurturing of men to bless the world, no 
other work of woman can be compared. Let her only point to a family of 
bright and happy and well-trained children, saying with the Roman matron, 
"These are my jewels," — and she need envy no coronets of gems that glitter 
upon the heads of queens. Every theory which ignores the necessity and 
dignity of this work, or aims to put upon it the stamp of inferiority, not only 
proclaims itself, by that very act, futile and irrational, but tends to unsettle 
all right ideas of human relations and to disorganize and destroy society. 
They who would secure freedom from this work that God has laid upon 
them, with the idea that a public career is more noble, secure it only by 
denying their sex and putting contempt upon true womanhood. And the 
great accusation which we bring against the Woman's Rights movement is 
that, whether consciously or not, it proceeds upon the assumption that there 
is a higher life for woman than that of the family and the home, that there 
is no difference of obligation arising from sex, no subordination of woman's 
office and calling to that of men, in fine, no real womanhood as distinguished 
from manhood. 

It has been the fancy of some that, as civilization lifted up the female sex, 
the differences of character and of occupation between woman and man might 
wholly disappear. Aside from the objection, which ought to count much 
with such persons, that if this were so there are a thousand rough and 
menial occupations which would fall to woman's share, and so her fancied 
advance be only a degradation, it may be said also that all experience shows 
a growing difference between the sexes, instead of a growing likeness, as civ- 
ilization advances. The lower down you get in the scale of civilization, the 
smaller are the differences between the outward work of woman and man, 
and between his mind and hers. In Switzerland and Germany you may see 
any day hundreds of women digging and wheeling earth for railroad embank- 
ments. And, while the woman digs and plows in the fields, the man not 
unfrecmently knits or cooks at home. The one is as rough and masculine 
as the other ; they have nearly the same dress ; you cannot tell one voice from 
the other, and they exchange works with little or no sense of impropriety. 
So it is in all rude and early stages of society. But, in an advanced civiliza- 



406 WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK. 

tion, the differences of sex become more marked. Woman's voice become* 
softer, ber face and hands more delicate, her dress more elaborate, and with 
this outward change there is an inward change corresponding. There is the 
old progress of the married pair from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from 
likeness to difference. The idea that a woman is to be more like man in the 
progress of civilization is all a delusion, since it is only in civilization that 
the more subtle characteristics of the sexes are made manifest. And the 
more woman is civilized, the less she desires to be like man, — the less pos- 
sible lr is for her to be like man. Civilization and Christianity bring her up 
gradually, from her slavish subjection and oppression, to a place where her 
natural equality is recognized and respected, — but they will only make her 
more truly woman, not more nearly man. Hrr subordination of office will 
be more and more perfectly seen in the Christian humility and gentleness 
and endurance of her character, and in her indisposition to assume the place 
or do the work o* man. In the very creation of mankind in the garden of 
beauty, undefiled by the slimy track of the serpent as it was, God ordained 
the subordination of women and the differences of nature that make that 
subordination inevitable ; and it is the greatest heresy of modern radicalism 
to denounce as barbarism this divinely appointed relation of the sexes. Dr. 
Bushnell tells us that the Buddhist women of China, who believe that they 
existed as dogs and cats before they came into this world, and call their 
present despised condition as women by the name of the "bitterness," ear- 
nestly pray their god Buddha to grant them his favor, that in the next trans- 
migratory state they may enter upon life in the position of men, and of men 
in good circumstances. Have we actually fallen upon a time when women 
so little value the dignity and privileges of womanhood, as to seek even in 
this life to be no longer women, but men? Napoleon said that the great 
need of France was good mothers. Is it possible that women can conceive 
that it lies nearer their true powers and duties to be good politicians? 

I fear, too, the effect of these fundamental heresies upon the marriage 
bond. When you look upon woman as only a second edition of man, you 
lose the true idea of marriage as the unity of two different personalities. 
Marriage is a very different thing from the union of two friends, or the part- 
nership of two merchants. It is the bringing together of two halves, and 
the making of them one, of halves that greatly differ from each other. Man 
and woman are complements to each other, and the entire rounded being is 
only made up by the united life of the two. Therefore it is a union for life; 
and the violation of faith on either side cuts at the very root of all morality. 
It is a union constituted by God, and dissoluble only by his hand in death. 
Now the moment you make woman to be man, forgetting that she is not 
identical with man but different, that moment you turn marriage into a part- 
nership, which, like some other partnerships, has no binding obligations to 
it, any longer than both parties are satisfied with its continuance. It Is no 
longer a union, but a confederation, as the rebels said of our national gov- 
ernment, and so may be dissolved at will. Wrong views of the nature and 
position of women lead directly and logically to this result. And in prac- 
tice, it is not so far away. We have a leading woman apostle of this move- 
ment declaring that "true marriage dwells in the sanctuary of the soul, 
beyond the cognizance or sanction of state or church," and intimating that 



WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK. 407 

unbappiness in the relation is a proper reason for seeking happiness else- 
where. I am pained to hear even John Stuart Mill saying that it is a pity 
not to give a woman who is the body-slave of a despot, the opportunity of 
trying her fortune twice. I am solicitous about the effect of the Woman's 
Rights agitation, not so much on account of the direct objects it seeks, as 
on account of the false underlying principles which are assumed in it. We 
live in a time of such general migration, that the restraints of home and the 
care for established reputation are far too little thought of. Desertions of 
husbands by wives and wives by husbands, and divorces for trifling causes, 
have been destroying in the public mind the idea of the sanctity of marriage. 
And we must guard against the spread of any principles which will strengthen 
these evil tendencies of our day, — for the moment marriage becomes a mere 
partnership, womanhood is dead, and a death-blow is struck at public virtue. 
And what shall we say to the claim of the suffrage which is made for 
woman? I am aware that many good men advocate the admission of women 
to the privilege of the ballot. But, while I desire to give to women the larg- 
est liberty and the widest influence which the best of the sex desire, I have 
most serious doubts whether both of these, as well as the interests of society, 
will not be compromised by conferring upon them the franchise. And that 
for the same reason that underlies all my former arguments, namely, that 
the putting of political power into the hands of women is not only contrary 
to any right theory of true womanhood, but contrary also to any right the- 
ory of the family. The power of rule seems to me to have been vested in 
the head of the family, that he may act for them, or rather that they may 
act through him. There is a shrinking from the publicity and collisions of 
politics, which seems a part of the nature of woman, and to lie down deeper 
than the effects of education or circumstances. The law, that seems to some 
so faulty, has caught a glimpse of the fact that man and wife are one, and 
that the individual is not the true unit of civil society, but the family. If 1 
am not mistaken, the whole argument for the suffrage rests upon the uncon- 
scious assumption that a woman is a man, instead of constituting in her 
normal relations a part of a higher unity — a unity in which she is a part 
and man is a part, but of which he, by virtue of his office, as man and as 
head, is the proper representative. But even allowing that she is the same 
as man, does it follow that the possession of humanity gives a natural right, 
to the ballot? Not so, for if this were true, all might vote, — the fact that 
one was a human being would determine the right to the franchise. But chil- 
dren do not vote ; the sick and the absent do not vote ; the criminal and the 
insane do not vote. Others vote as their representatives, — or rather, their 
interests are represented by those whom the state allows to vote. A whole 
half of the male population do not vote at all. Voting then is not a natural 
right, for government is representation, and only those vote to whom soci- 
ety thinks it for its best interests to grant the franchise. Women then have 
no right to the suffrage, simply on the ground that they are a part of human- 
ity. If they have the privilege of voting, it must be because society thinks 
it for the interest of women themselves and for the interest of the State that 
they should vote, and so has actually conferred the privilege upon them. 

When it comes to the question of expediency and advantage, also, the 
preponderance of argument is against it. Add to the pernicious effect upon 



408 WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK. 

the family of making the married paid two instead of one, the other dangers 
of destroying all the dignity and delicacy of womanhood in primary meet- 
ings and party caucuses, — add female corruption and intrigue, such as 
we have seen recent specimens of at Washington, to the already serious evils 
of our political situation, — intensify political bitterness and strife by that 
feeling of partizanship which belongs more to women than to men, — 
and I think we can see only evil in the measure. It is said that the pres- 
ence of women will refine and adorn our elections and public councils. 
But women are naturally not so much better than men, — the same publicity 
of life and mingling with the rude and boisterous crowd would after a time 
take the edge off from their manners and neutralize their influence. A great 
part of women's refining influence hitherto has been due to the fact that they 
have not been accustomed to a public life. Whether their purifying power 
could long withstand the corruptions of modern politics is more than doubt- 
ful. Besides all this, it seems to me that neither they nor the State at large 
need their votes. They do not need these votes to protect their own rights. 
Their husbands and brothers are ready to give these to them. They are not 
without representation. Those they love best are their representatives. 
To admit them to the franchise is to declare that men and women are two 
different classes upon the same level, whereas the truth is, these two classes 
are, both in theory and in practice, one. In the vote of the husband, the wife 
bears her part of silent and powerful influence, — in the votes of men, the 
whole class of women is represented also. When one of our late reformers 
said she did not care to vote, if she only might talk, she unconsciously and 
by accident gave the true solution of the whole matter. Woman's place is 
not that of direct political power, but of indirect influence through those 
who wield the power. 

It has been common to scout the Bible, as antiquated and worn out, and 
to deny it any place in deciding upon the claims of modern philosophies 
and reforms. But there is a constant surprise and gratitude to the Christian 
as he sees how the principles of Scripture, enunciated so many thousand 
years ago, are still applicable to these days in which we live, throwing the 
most vivid light upon human relations and setting before us most clearly 
the way of personal duty. I have aimed to make my treatment of this sub- 
ject a simple application, to one of the most perplexing questions of our 
time, of the old truth of God. I may have failed to convince you, but I 
trust we have seen that while woman can claim equality with man in nature, 
she misses her true place and work when she forgets that she is different 
from him, and in office subordinate to him. She gains most herself, and does 
most for others, when she recognizes this divine order and accepts the place 
of man's helper, without aspiring to fill that of man himself. 

The Woman's Rights Convention, which held its sessions in this city dur- 
ing the past week, adopted a series of resolutions among which I find the 
following: "Resolved, that as the duty of every individual is self-develop- 
ment, the lessons of self-sacrifice and obedience taught woman by the Chris- 
tian church have been fatal, not only to her own highest interest, but 
through her have also dwarfed and degraded the race." And then come two 
others in which, if I do not misunderstand them, woman is urged to take 
reason instead of revelation for her guide, make the present life instead of 



WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK. 409 

the future the object of her care, and so escape from the subjugating influ- 
ences of priestcraft and superstition. And yet all that woman has she owes 
to Christianity, and all that she has won has been won by the increasing 
power of this very gospel of self-sacrifice, which she is now called upon to 
reject. So fatuous and ruinous are counsels of those who prefer the light 
of an unsanctified reason to that which streams from the word of God. I 
am glad that Frederick Douglass had the judgment to point out that self- 
development and self-sacrifice are not inconsistent with each other. The 
Convention passed these resolutions, but they do not express the sentiments 
of the true friends of woman, they do not express the sentiments of true 
women themselves. Self -development through self-sacrifice, this is not only 
the law of woman's being, — it is the law of all being — even that of the Son of 
God, — and, when woman forgets it, she casts away her crown. Her true place 
and work is that of man's helper. This she may be in the married state, 
and doubtless here her highest work and most lasting influence reside. But, 
whether she be married or not, she still may in a most true sense be man's 
helper. With many holy ministries of counsel, of admonition, of invitation, 
of example, she may elevate, refine, purify, society ; she may relieve distress, 
and stimulate to noble achievement ; she may point the young and the old 
alike to Jesus her Savior. And here, in this spiritual help, the glory of every 
true woman lies. She can speak, when others' words would not be heard. 
She can reach depths of the soul by the tones of her voice, and the modesty 
of her demeanor, and the clearness of her faith, which men cannot reach. 
Oh, let these powers be used for Christ, in the family, in the Sabbath school, 
in the social circle, and many of you, my sisters, may have the joy of wel- 
coming sinners to the kingdom of God. "With works such as these" — I 
quote from Adolph Monod's sermon on the Life of Woman — 'with works 
such as these to do, are you jealous of still greater works reserved for others? 
Let me wake in you a holy jealousy, — let me lead you to appreciate the 
position in which God has placed you. Conform yourselves to his views, 
without a word of complaint or regret ; and, putting away all ambitious views 
of change, cherish a joyful fidelity to your peculiar mission, and a heart 
which envies nothing but a more active charity and a more profound humil- 
ity. Woman, in fine, whoever thou art and wherever thou art, take to thy 
heart this word: ' I will make for him an helpmeet,' and determine, without 
more delay, to justify the definition which God has given of theel" 



XLI. 
WOMAN'S WORK IN MISSIONS.* 



I should greatly feel the honor of addressing this assembly of Christian 
women, if I were not so deeply impressed with the responsibility. I have 
been awed as I have gone into the engine-room of an ocean steamer, and 
have looked at the lever which could unlock its sources of strength and set 
the great vessel moving on its way. That lever I should have hardly dared 
to touch. So I feel, as I stand before this Woman's Missionary Society. It 
is a solemn thing to influence, in any degree, the movement of these forces 
for good. I do not flatter myself that I can add to the wisdom of your 
counsels. I shall be content, if I can give to these earnest workers before 
me some new stimulus and hope. And this I can best do by speaking to 
you first of the great things which Christ has done for woman, and then of 
the great things which woman may do for Christ. 

Think for a moment what woman was in ancient society, and what she la 
now in heathen lands, and you will see how much she owes to Christ. There 
was the general polygamy of the nations of the East, which made woman 
only the toy and slave of man, and which, while it degraded her intellect 
and depraved her heart, made true conjugal affection and family peace 
impossible. Among the Greeks, though there was but one wife, the wife 
was still in a state of perpetual subjection. In Athens, she was allowed no 
true education or instruction ; was permitted only scant intercourse with 
her nearest relations, and even with her own husband, — lived indeed in a 
separate part of the house from him, and was dependent for her principal 
society upon her slaves. The husband found his advisers and confidants 
among educated courtesans, and these held an actually higher place in social 
esteem than the lawful wife. The wife was treated all her life long as a 
minor, — the widowed mother, instead of being the guardian of her own chil- 
dren, herself fell to the guardianship of her eldest son. And, to ",rown the 
whole, the husband might put away his wife at will, and at any time take 
another, younger, and fairer, and richer. In Rome, the stricter form of 
marriage put the wife completely at the mercy of the husband, giving him, 
as despot of the family, even the power of life and death. But this form 
of marriage had one advantage — it could not be easily dissolved. The 
commoner form was dissoluble upon the slightest pretexts. Caius Sulpicius 
Gallus divorced his wife because she had gone into the street without a vail. 
Cicero repudiated his first wife, in order to take a wealthier ; and put away 
this second, because she was not sufficiently sorry for his daughter's death. 
Woman came to be so despised that the Censor Metellus, 170 years before 



* An Address before the Annual Convention of the American Women's 
Baptist Missionary Society, delivered in the First Baptist Church, Roch- 
ester, April 18, 1883. 

410 



WOMAN'S WORK IN MISSIONS. 411 

Christ, had gone so far as to say in public: "Could we but exist as citizens 
■without wives, we should all be glad to get rid of such a burden." And 
yet these things existed in Athens and Rome, at the very height of their 
civilization. 

See what woman's condition is even now, in heathen lands : and you get 
some idea of what Christ has done for woman where the light of the gospel 
has come. It is the life of eighteen centuries ago brought down to this 
generation, — not one of its sorrows alleviated, not one of its outrages on 
womanhood outgrown. Still woman is the drudge and burden-bearer of 
man, or she is the mere instrument of his passion and the means of his 
greater degradation. Take the nations of the far East among whom our 
missions are established. The wife never sits by the side of her husband 
at the family meal,— she must stand by in silence to wait upon her betters. 
Only after her husband, and her sons too, have eaten, is she permitted to 
sit down to the remnants of the feast. She never walks by his side. She 
must follow after him, as if she were his menial servant and dependent. 
Instead of sharing in his plans and thoughts, stimulating his labors, and 
feeling that a part of his triumphs are her own, she must be content to 
know, only as a slave knows, of his purposes and his success. The blessed 
relation of confidence and equality which makes husband and wife in Chris- 
tian lands mutual helpers of each other in everything noble and pure ; the 
hallowed joy of a Christian home in which the wife reigns, with her hus- 
band, like a queen upon an equal throne ; the respect and reverence of the 
members of a Christian family, as they do little acts of duty to the mother 
of the household, — all this the heathen woman knows nothing of. Nothing 
is before her in life but the silly idle routine of a favorite, closely watched 
and guarded, or the unrewarded round of hopeless drudgery, varied only 
by the frequent cruelty of an arbitrary master. With no resources of edu- 
cation to furnish food for thought, and with no religious knowledge but the 
dreadful phantoms of an idolatrous worship, life is only a weary mockery 
and show, from which death itself, if it were not for heart-freezing fears of 
the future, would be a glad relief. 

All this in civilized and semi-civilized lands. But, as you get further from 
Christianity, the condition of woman becomes more desperate. There are 
savage tribes like the Koussa Kaffirs, where there is absolutely no feeling of 
love in marriage. In Australia, women are treated with the utmost brutality, 
beaten and speared in the limbs on the most trivial provocation, so that few 
women can ire found free from frightful scars upon the head, or the marks 
of spear-wounds upon the body. In Tahiti, infanticide prevailed to such 
an extent before the gospel was preached there, that the missionaries con- 
sidered that not less than two-thirds of the children were murdered by their 
parents. Mr. Ellis says: "I do not recollect having met with a female in 
the islands during the whole period of my residence there, who had been 
a mother while idolatry prevailed, who had not imbrued her hands in the 
blood of her offspring." Among the Fijians, the mothers themselves 
were killed as soon as they began to feel the approach of old age, having 
only their choice of being strangled or buried alive. Mr. Hunt tells us that 
a young man among them came to him and invited him to attend his mother's 
funeral, which was just going to take place. He accepted the invitation and 



412 WOMAN'S WORK IN MISSIONS. 

joined the procession, but, surprised to see no corpse, he made Inquiries, 
when the young man pointed out his mother, who was walking along with 
them, alive and well. On Mr. Hunt's expressing his astonishment, the 
young Fijian replied that she was old, that his brother and himself had 
thought she had lived long enough, that they had made her death-feast and 
were now going to bury her. Mr. Hunt did all he could to prevent so dia- 
bolical an act, but the only reply he received was that she was their mother 
and they her children, and that they ought to put her to death. A little 
further or< they came to a grave, already dug; the mother sat down, and all 
her children and grandchildren took leave of her ; a rope made of twist< d 
tapa was then passed twice around her neck by her sons, who took hold of it 
and strangled her; after which she was put in her grave and buried, with 
the usual ceremonies. 

If this picture of what women can become without the gospel were only 
the picture of a present reality, it would not be so frightful, but let us 
remember that it is self-perpetuating. As the mothers are, so are their 
children. Degraded and savage mothers reproduce themselves in their off- 
spring,— the benighted and besotted mind of the mother is the spring of 
blindness and cruelty and misery without end. not only to her female but 
to her male descendants. And when we consider how many such mothers 
there are, how incalculably great seems the evil of woman's present condi- 
tion and the consequences of corruption and death that flow therefrom ! 
"Remember," says Mr. Bainbridge, "that 200,000.000 women are living in 
the only Buddhist hope beyond this world, of perhaps being born again a 
man instead of a toad or a snake ; that 90,000,000 women more are in the 
most abject slavery, body and soul, to their Hindu lords ; and that still 
80,000,000 more are in Moslem harems, unloved, uncared for, but as slaves 
of passion, and certainly expecting to be supplanted in the dismal remnant 
of their conjugal affections by ' the black -eyed houris ' promised to the faith- 
ful in Mahomet's paradise." 

And yet, to use the language of a noble Christian woman, "according to 
present appearances, these seething masses are to go on from generation to 
generation, constantly repeating and deepening their degradation. More 
than four hundred millions of women still in heathen darkness ! It is diffi- 
cult to comprehend so large a number, but let one of these young ladies 
stand at this church door and spend the working hours of each day in count- 
ing this vast multitude as they pass by her at the rate of one every second, 
sixty every minute, thirty-six hundred every hour, and her hair would be 
gray and the light of youth gone from her eye before the last of these be- 
nighted sin-stricken sisters of hers would have filed past. Thirty thousand 
women, capable of purity and love and education and lofty thought and all 
of the Christian experience that brings us into such tender relation to Christ 
and enables us to call a holy God, Father — thirty thousand of these women 
every day are dropping into a grave only a little darker than the life they 
leave. In life, they are shut out from all that makes life desirable to you. 
Christian mother or wife or daughter." In death, they are buried in a 
heathen's grave, while the immortal part, consciously guilty and full of 
fears, enters in terror upon a hopeless eternity. 

From all this, Christian women. Christ by his blessed gospel has delivered 



WOMAN'S WORK IN MISSIONS. 413 

you. He delivered you from it, first, by honoring and consecrating woman's 
nature when he was born of a woman. He might have come into the world 
in other ways than this, descending like some bright-winged angel, or light- 
footed Apollo, to the earth. But no, he saw the suffering, down-trodden, 
crushed and broken-hearted sex, whose crown of glory had fallen, and the 
whiteness of whose robes was draggling in the mire, and it entered his heart 
so to distinguish this sorrowful and sinning womanhood, that it might be 
lifted up again from its degradation, and gain a dignity and glory that should 
more than counterbalance all the misery and shame of its former fall. And 
so from the flesh of Mary the Virgin he took his own human flesh, in the 
eyes of all the world santifying and enobling that motherhood which had 
been before accounted only woman's mark of inferiority and weakness. 
Thus motherhood has been made sacred, and woman has come to be honored 
for the sake of it. In the Tribune of the Pitti Palace at Florence I saw the 
statue of the Venus de' Medici, the best representation in sculpture of the 
classic type of beauty. It had come down from pagan antiquity — the 
undraped form of a woman — the statue of an unchaste goddess, fashioned, 
it may be, as many such statues were, after the living form of some noted 
harlot in the days of Pericles. It did not seem to be an accident that 
directly above the statue, and near it on the wall, there hung that lovliest 
of all of Raphael's creations, the Madonna della Seggiola, that picture of 
the Virgin and the infant Savior, upon which no spectator looks without new 
reverence for woman and new conceptions of the way in which that mighty 
mission of bearing upon her bosom the Son of God has consecrated and 
exalted her. The two works of art are separated by an infinite moral dis- 
tance, though so close together, and they show what woman is without Christ, 
and with him. The most beautiful statue of woman that pagan antiquity 
can furnish us is the undraped statue of a harlot. The picture of the mother 
of Jesus, clothed aud in her right mind, and clinging with motherly devo- 
tion to the wondrous child she holds in her blessed arms, shows us, in its 
matchless dignity and purity and sweetness, what woman is, now that the 
incarnation of Christ has given to her once more her lost sceptre and glory. 
Henceforth none may enslave her or despise her, since the Son of God has 
bestowed on her such honor. Just in the proportion that civilization retro- 
grades, as in France, to the pagan skepticism and sensualism, just in that 
proportion is woman remanded to her old position in classic times, and 
is treated only as an animal and a servant. Just in proportion as civilization 
is pervaded with Christian ideas, does wifehood and motherhood become the 
object of men's reverence and devotion. 

Christ has delivered woman from degradation, again, by dying for her 
and by thus showing the value of her soul, and her religious equality with 
man. Heathen religions had declared that woman had no soul. The Rabbins 
had so far perverted the teachings of the Old Testament Scriptures as to 
discourage, if not absolutely to forbid, the religious instruction of women. 
But, in opposition to all this, Jesus taught the Samaritan woman at Jacob's 
well, and Mary, the sister of Lazarus, as she sat at his feet In the house; 
declared, of her who put the two mites into the treasury, that she had cast in 
more than they all ; accepted the ministrations of women in his journeyings ; 
made them the first publishers of his gospel after his resurrection. Thus he 



414 WOMAN'S WORK IN MISSIONS. 

made known the fact that his death was suffered for all the human race, not 
for men only but for women also, and that salvation was offered nut to per- 
sons of one sex only, but to every creature. How great a change this made 
in the condition of woman, to be treated as a rational and Immortal being, 
whose soul was of enough value to be worth the sacrifice of the Son of God, 
we may try to imagine but can hardly fully comprehend. I know that there 
was a Teutonic reverence for woman — the relic, as I believe, of her origi- 
nal God-given rights and dignity — and that this helped on the influence 
of Christianity when it sought to restore her to her place. But I also know 
that the German tribes, in contact with the debased civilization of Rome, 
would have lost that reverence, if the religion of Christ had not furnished it 
with a new motive and ground. That motive and ground were found in the 
death of Christ. That the Lord of glory should die for her and should give 
to her his infinite Spirit, that she should be admitted on an equal footing to 
all the privileges of his church, and commissioned as a fellow-helper in the 
propagation of his gospel, was a spectacle almost as striking as the breaking 
down of the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile, — indeed was 
an earlier declaration of the same principle, that henceforth nothing should 
be called common or unclean. And so the women of Christian lands, 
whether they honor this Savior in their hearts or not. whether they openly 
profess his name or refuse to acknowledge him, can never rid themselves of 
their obligation to him. All that they have of social privilege and respect, 
standing as they do, side by side with their brothers or husbands instead of 
waiting behind them, the unpitied victims of scorn and abuse, all this they 
owe to the death of Jesus for them. That death put honor and dignity upon 
all human souls, — that death decided the religious equality of the sexes, — 
that death lifted woman up to the place from which she first was taken, 
nearest to man's side and closest to his heart. 

Once more only, — Jesus has delivered woman by living for her, as well as 
dying for her. I refer particularly to his exaltation of the passive virtues, 
in his precept and example. Before his coming, men honored the active 
virtues, and called them manly. Courage, energy, strength, ambition. — 
these were glorified. But the passive virtues — patience, meekness, tender- 
ness, humility- — these were thought unmanly, and men scorned them, as 
mere weakness. But these were the virtues of a full half of human kind, — 
in scorning these they scorned woman, God's last and best creation. And 
so man lost immeasurably in his own character, and treated woman with hid- 
eous injustice, and yet called it just. Now have you ever thought how much 
Christ did for woman by combining her virtues with man's and by giving to 
the world, in his own character, the perfect image of them both? Thus 
Christ became the perfect representative of humanity, — all virtues and graces, 
whether manly or womanly, meet and blend in him. Before the minds of 
men there is the picture of the living Jesus as he walked in Palestine, with 
his patient biding of his time, his tender sympathy for all distress, his 
shrinking from the public eye, his meek sufferance under injuries sore and 
unprovoked, his matchless forgiveness to those who deserved his wrath. 
And so in his precepts. He did not exalt and dignify the self-asserting and 
combative qualities. — the world had made idols of them, and would idolize 
them without his help,- — but he uttered his blessing mainly upon those vir- 



WOMAN'S WORK IN MISSIONS. 415 

tues which had been so forgotten that they had almost ceased to be virtues — 
the passive virtues, which seem most natural and find their highest develop- 
ment in woman. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, 
the hungering and thirsting after righteouness, the pure in heart, the 
persecuted." Even skeptics have noticed with wonder the utter unlikeness 
of all tins to the standards of society in Jesus' time. "Have you observed." 
says Renan, <n a letter to Strauss, "how there is absent from the beatitudes 
all mention or praise of what we call the warlike virtues?" Ah, it was a 
deeper wisdom than Renan or Strauss can comprehend — wisdom that would 
add, to all virtues recognized before, a whole class which the world had hith- 
erto despised. To the masculine finalities of a noble soul were added by 
Christ those which up to that day had been considered distinctively feminine, 
so that henceforth th»i two must go together. And so, all that was beautiful 
in chivalry was the result of Jesus' teaching, and the meekness and patience 
which chivalry never showed are coming to be recognized as elements of the 
truest character. All this has turned to the advantage of woman. Exalting 
men's esteem of that which is so commonly feminine has exalted woman 
herself. That which once was thought her weakness and shame has, through 
Christ's precept and example, come to be considered her real glory, till now 
a Christian civilization accords to her a place and an influence, different in 
kind from man's, yet equal to man's own, and man himself delights to own 
her gentle and persuasive sway. 

Thus we have followed woman from the depths of her ancient sorrow aud 
shame to the blessed heights which she now occupies, and have seen that 
she owes all this advancement to Christ. Oh, how infinite is her debt to 
him! How shall she ever repay it? There is a way in which she may at 
least testify her gratitude — by using these new-found powers and this 
widening influence for the extension to others of the blessings which she 
herself is permitted to enjoy. Oh, Christian women ! the history of this 
Society is witness that you cannot look down from this height of privilege 
upon the dark masses of your oppressed and benighted sisters in heathen 
lands, without feeling that you are debtors to them all, to carry or to send 
to them this same priceless gospel. In these late years, God has been 
moving by his spirit upon the hearts of Christian women in America, as he 
never has moved upon them before, showing them that they have a work 
of their own to do, and peculiar gifts and qualifications for the doing of it. 
Woman's work for woman in heathen lands — this has become a watchword 
and an Inspiration to thousands in other denominations as well as ours. 
Presbyterians and Methodists, indeed, have gone before us, and, by their 
zeal and success in organizing the women of their churches for this special 
work, have demonstrated how great a power resides in the Christian women 
of every denomination, which is yet unused, but which by combination may 
be made to tell with wonderful effect in raising from their misery the mil- 
lions of women on the other side of the world. 

Every one of you knows that the great obstacle to the success of general 
preaching, in many heathen countries, is the seclusion of the female portion 
of the community. Women, especially of the better classes, are not per- 
mitted to appear in public, — the preacher does not see them in his congre- 
gations, and he is not admitted to their homes. And yet, while the women 



416 WOMAN'S WORK IN MISSIONS. 

are unreached, there is a mighty barrier in the missionary's way. Let the 
men of a community be impressed by the preaching of the gospel, yet the 
influence of the wives upon them and upon their children is mightier than 
that of the missionary. The heathen mother makes a heathen household, 
whatever the husbaud and father may be. Many intelligent Mohammedans 
are beginning to see that their women should have some education and refine- 
ment, for the sake of their sons. Archbishop Hughes said once: "Let me 
have the children of the country under my instruction, until their seventh 
year, and I will defy you to get them away from me thereafter." So let 
heathen mothers carry their little children to the feet of the great idol, to 
bow and offer flowers before it. and the influence of that early training will 
be almost impossible to overcome. If we would evangelize a land, we must 
make the mothers, as well as the fathers. Christian, — only when Christianity 
takes root in the family is it safe, and sure of perpetual growth. Now 
who can reach these heathen mothers? Men? No, not men, but women. 
Women must carry to them the gospel — not in the formal way of preaching, 
but by visiting them in their homes, ministering to them in their sickness, 
comforting them in their afflictions, and then pointing the way to him who 
is the greater Comforter and Savior. The blessing which has attended the 
Zenana work — the work of female missionaries in the private apartments 
of heathen women — -shows that women have qualifications and advantages 
for certain sorts of evangelizing effort, such as men have not, and never 
can expect to have. By the teaching of children who otherwise would be 
brought up in all the demoralizing ideas and customs of paganism, by 
readings of the Scriptures to knots of girls and women assembled together, 
by self-sacrificing ministrations to their own sex in time of sickness and 
need, women can be an unspeakable blessing to their degraded sisters, and 
can open new doors through which may enter into great nations the healing 
and saving influences of the gospel of Christ. 

Much of this work must be done, if done at all, by unmarried female 
missionaries. The wives of missionaries already on the field have their 
peculiar family cares, and their duties lie mostly in their own homes. Our 
general society, the Missionary Union, to which this is auxiliary, already 
provides for these women with their husbands. The other work of sending 
out and supporting unmarried women who can give their whole time to 
labors among those of their own sex — this work demanded a new agency, 
and the agency has been fjund in the Woman's Missionary Society. All 
honor to those who first conceived the plan and to those who have so nobly 
executed it ! The 36 missionaries and 48 Bible women whom you are now 
supporting; the 86 schools you have aided, with their 3,294 pupils; your 400 
mission bands with their 8.000 members; your 1.000 mission circles with 
their 2.500 contributors; and the $54,000 you have collected for the work in 
a single year, in addition to the funds raised by the Society of the West, — 
this is a record that provokes our praise and gratitude. Here is a great 
word done abroad. But it is also plain that there has been a great work done 
at home. Not all Christian women can go abroad. But all Christian women 
may pray and give that others may go. They may combine and organize, 
so that their interest in women abroad may be not only increased, but also 
utilized and made the means of definite and positive good. It Is not every 



WOMAN'S WORK IN MISSIONS. 417 

Christian woman who gives at all to the cause of missions. The wives and 
daughters of Christian men too often hide themselves behind their husbands 
or fathers, and think it enough that they should give in their stead. It is 
of inestimable importance that these reserves should be called out, and that 
they should have a part in the battle. I count it a vast gain, when I see set 
on foot a plan which aims at nothing less than bringing the million and a 
half of Baptist women in this land to feel their individual responsibility for 
the conversion of their heathen sisters across the sea, and to give even the 
least weekly or yearly sum to bring about the great result. 

I believe that, in this Women's Missionary movement, the rock has been 
smitten, and a spring has begun to flow that will go on forever. Can any 
one think that when God once stirs the great woman's heart of our churches, 
that heart will ever cease to beat in sympathy with the wants and woes of 
her suffering sisters, or to yearn for the salvation of these millions who are 
too far gone in their degradation and sin to make any struggle for deliver- 
ance? No, my sisters, this work is of God, begun never more to cease till 
the last heathen woman is lifted from her misery, and rejoices in the saving 
grace of Christ. "How mighty the field that is before you, — how vast the 
responsibility laid upon your hands ! But, mighty as is the field, and vast 
as is the responsibility, Christ's call comes to you to go forward, and he 
himself goes with you. He has called you only because it is his purpose to 
make you the means of converting the women of the world to him, only be- 
cause it is his purpose to give you the ultimate salvation of these millions as 
the reward of your labor and the answer of your prayers. Let no work to 
which Providence opens the way seem too great for you. Let no blessing 
to the myriads of your lost sisters for which his Spirit prompts you to pray, 
seem too vast to plead for in his name. Take upon your hearts the burden 
of this great world's guilt and trouble, as that Syro-Phoenician woman took 
upon herself the burdeu of her daughter's disease and pain, — identify 
yourselves with it, and bearing it to Christ as if it were your own personal 
sorrow, say to him as that woman did: "Lord, help me!" Who knows 
but he may say to you as he said to her: "O woman, great is thy faith; be 
it unto thee, even as thou wilt!" 



XLII. 
THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN.* 



It Is an honor to be permitted any share, however humble, In such Anni- 
versary exercises as these. As a fellow-worker from an adjoining field, I 
come to congratulate both teachers and scholars here upon the results of 
another rounded year of labor. Some of these results are visible, and we see 
them before us. Many more are not open to casual sight, but are all the 
more permanent and valuable. The teacher's reward is not so much in the 
present, as in the future. As Jean Paul says of the obscure teachers of vil- 
lage schools: "They fall from notice like the spring blossoms, but they fall 
that the fruit may be born." So, as I look about me upon these many evi- 
dences of thorough and successful work, and reflect that all this patieut 
endeavor and achievement has gone to the widening of mental view, the 
training of faculty, and the building up of character, I am filled with rejoic- 
ing that such institutions exist, and that such teachers devote to them the 
unselfish service of their lives. 

And yet, it is not merely the assurance of my reverent regard that I would 
extend to-day. I would, if possible, give some help also. Lofty estimates 
of others' work are more cheering, if they are accompanied by something 
that shall make the practical problems of that work more comprehensible, 
or its prosecution more inspiring. It would be presumptuous for one whose 
thoughts have been mainly occupied in another sphere of inquiry to assume- 
to settle any of the vexed questions here. And yet the subject of The Edu- 
cation of a Woman is one upon which each of us may well have thoughts of 
his own. Let me venture, even In the presence of those whose practical 
experience has been far greater than mine, to give you a few results of my 
reflections. 

The most difficult problem of education in general is, how at once to store 
the mind, and to set the mind to work. Reception on the one hand, an<l 
mental gymnastics on the other, — the filling of the furnace, and the fusing 
of the ore. Education certainly Implies this last. Etymologically, as you 
know, the word means a "drawing forth," and it implies that the mind has 
in it certain hidden capacities or powers, which by appropriate means can be 
drawn forth in exercise or use. Now there is important truth here. Edu- 
cation is a process of eliciting the inner aptitudes of the soul, and training 
them to harmonious and effective action. Discipline is one of Its most 
obvious implications. But you are well aware that it is possible to carry this 
idea too far. There are certain doctrinaires who would make discipline the 
be-all and end-all of education. They would develop the mind by taxing it, 



• An Address delivered at the Commencement of the Granger Place School, 
Canandaigua, Tuesday morning, June 20, 1882. 



THE EDUCATION OE A WOMAN. 



410 



just as you briug out the elasticity of a rubber band by stretching it. Within 
are inexhaustible fountains, they would say; all you have to do is to draw 
upon them. Out of it>elf the mind will spin you a web, as the spider does. 
It may criticise and compare what comes to it from without, but all real 
material of knowledge is from within. And this scheme reaches its acme 
and best illustration in the idealistic philosophy, which regards the external 
world as merely the inward creation of him who thinks it — constructed only 
out of ''such stuff as dreams are made of." 

The German Christlieb has well expressed the fundamental error of this 
way of thinking, when he says: "Reason is not a material source of knowl- 
edge, but a faculty without concrete contents." You cannot expect to get 
anything out, unless you first put something in. Involution before evolution, 
always. Education does not consist simply in discipline. All our mechani- 
cal systems of school training need to be corrected here. Before discipline, 
and in order to furnish the material upon which it is to work, there must be 
impartation and reception of truth. Before the training and drawing forth 
of faculty are possible, there must be something for faculty to work upon. 
How do you draw out the plant? Surely not by stretching it, as you stretch 
the elastic band. No, you treat It as a living thing. You supply it with 
soil and water and sunshine. You impart to it, before you expect it to impart 
to you. Now the human soul is, in like manner, a living thing. It is not 
independent of God or of the truth. It never will create God or the uni- 
verse. And yet it must be brought into contact with these, or it will never 
grow. This is the teacher's work — to bring truth in contact with the living 
mind and soul. Truth is the mind's natural nutriment and stimulus. Impar- 
tation of truth is the first part of education ; the drawing out and exercise 
of the powers is the second. 

Thus I have taken you back to the basis of all education — the truth. 
The teacher has the magnificent task of bringing the wide range of truth in 
contact with the mind, and of directing the processes of the mind as it appro- 
priates the truth and exercises itself upon it ; while the scholar has the cor- 
respondingly noble task, first, of reception from without, and then of living 
reconstruction from within. But now I wish you to push on with me to 
another point of fiew, and to consider that the success of education is to be 
tested by the scholar's ability to find truth for himself, and to be independ- 
ent of his teacher. That is a very dead and mechanical view of education 
which conceives of it as the stamping of the seal into soft wax, — it is more 
nearly like the transformation of the wax into a seal. The teacher's work is 
not done, until the scholar is ready to be a teacher. The teacher has impart- 
ed nothing of great value, unless he has imparted the love for knowledge; the 
disposition to use elementary training as the instrument for further investi- 
gation ; and such facility and accuracy in the processes of study, as turns 
them from a burden into a pleasure. How much we owe to the personal 
influences that have formed our youthful ambitions ! Many a noble woman 
looks back to the teachers of this school as the source of that passion for 
knowledge which has elevated and refined her whole life, and many more I 
trust will yet go out from these walls, scorning to be mere reflectors of chance 
influences from without ; burning after some original understanding of phi- 
losophy and science, of literature and history and art; and ready to be, under 
God independent centres of thought and of motive power to others. 



420 THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 

We sometimes speak of 'the higher education," — and we ordinarily mean 
by it all training beyond that of our common schools. The higher education 
would to most minds imply something of classical study. But I am inclined 
to use the phrase in a new sense, and to say that no human being, whatever 
he may study, passes over the line which separates the lower education from 
the higher, until he seeks knowledge, not from reward or from compulsion, 
but from an inward love. Let us call that the lower education which busies 
itself with youth while they are yet mainly in the receptive stage, exercising 
themselves for the most part upon what they have received from without, 
and held to their work more because they have been set there to do it, than 
because of any eager desire of their own. The higher education begins 
whenever the pupil wakes to the recognition of the slumbering possibilities 
of his being, and begins of his own accord to reach outward after the true, 
the beautiful, and the good. In the lower education, the teacher imparts 
knowledge as a manufactured article ; in the higher, he furnishes only the 
raw material, and moves the pupil to manufacture for himself. In the lower, 
the scholar is still wholly dependent ; in the higher, he has acquired some- 
thing of spontaneity, and ability to conduct business for himself. There i- 
no educated man or woman who does not remember the passage from the 
oue stage to the other as one of the marked epochs of life, and say of it : 
"Then first I emerged from bondage into freedom." And the glory of these 
school months and years is this, that they witness these changes from the 
chrysalis state,- — the leaving behind of childhood, and the dawn of a new 
intellectual life and liberty. 

Receptivity and spontaneity, — these are the two things I have thus far 
urged as essential to true education. But I must mention another, and that 
is — exhaustive study within a certain limited sphere. I shall never forget my 
first college recitation, and the seemingly infinite number of questions which 
I found could be asked about one line of the Iliad. For the first time in 
my life I learned what it was to study a subject thoroughly, — to leave no 
stone unturned, — to examine it in all its relations. To learn that lesson is 
worth years of work. One text-book, absolutely mastered, is worth a whole 
library skimmed over and half forgotten. We may utter inward objurga- 
tions upon the head of the teacher who will not tolerate inaccuracy, but we 
bless afterwards ; while the teacher who smooths over our errors and neg- 
lects we may only curse in after years. Let us set the standard of scholastic 
attainment so high that a tone of thoroughness shall be imparted to the 
whole thinking and life. Here, if I mistake not, is the fault which most 
educated men find with the ordinary girls' schools of our day, — they do not 
ground their pupils thoroughly in the elements of knowledge ; and, the 
foundation being insecure, the superstructure cannot possibly be firm. And 
this is the fault of much of women's writing. There are sprightliuess, imagi- 
nation, clear observation, inimitable strokes of description. With a little 
more thoroughness, as another has said, all that liveliness might become 
literature. But habits of exactness have not been cultivated, — the one flaw 
spoils the diamond. Patient production under criticism, the weighing of 
every word, the endless labor that makes a work of art, — these things must 
be learned in school days, or never. I am glad that there is so much in 
this School that answers to this idea of intellectual honesty. Be sure that 



THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 421 

there is no nobler praise than this for a seminary of learning, that it sends 
out students who know what they pretend to know. To do a few things 
thoroughly well, — this should be the constant aim of our modern education. 
And yet, as I said a little while ago that receptivity must be comple- 
mented by spontaneity, so here I must urge that this thoroughness in a 
limited sphere should be complemented by a certain breadth and complete- 
ness of culture. We not only need to know everything of something, but 
also something of everything. It does not follow that, because I cannot, 
with Macaulay, "'say off all my Archbishops of Canterbury," it is useless 
for me to know about that early Archbishop Thomas a-Becket, or that latest 
of all, Archbishop Tait. Knowledge is for use, and a little of it, instead of 
being a dangerous thing, may save a life from poisoning, or wing God's 
arrows of mercy to some recalcitrant and obdurate heart. One of the great 
advantages of schools like this is, that the pupil sees, in classmates and in 
teachers alike, many varieties of excellence, recognizes and admires many 
traits of character and gifts of mind, the very existence of which in the 
world was unknown before. Conceit and egotism disappear. So too with 
regard to studies. We commonly get our first bent toward a new kind of 
knowledge by the observation of some friend's enthusiasm for it. In a 
generous commonwealth like that of the seminary, we learn to respect all 
studies which have come to occupy the heads and hearts of its citizens. 
Provincialism and bigotry cannot live in such an atmosphere. I know that 
there are curious gusts of popular opinion in such schools, and universal, 
though temporary, mis judgments. But these errors correct themselves after 
a little, and the errors themselves are not half so narrow as the prejudices 
of the city set or clique. Breadth of view, and a generous sympathy with 
all good men and all good things, can nowhere be better learned than amid 
the peculiar excitements and emulations of the school, under the guiding 
hands of calm and wise teachers, with the whole world of truth and beauty 
opening around one like a new creation of God. 

Ought women to learn the alphabet? So Mr. Higginson asked mock- 
ingly, a few years ago. But in some antediluvian era it was doubtless asked 
seriously. And there are people now who ask what good there is in women's 
learning Conic Sections and Greek. The only answer is, that God has given 
to women, just as he has to men, an intellectual nature, and that this fact 
binds them to make the most of themselves for his glory and for the good 
of human kind. He has bestowed upon them a talent, — he will require 
his own with usury. He has put within them a desire to know, — let them 
venture out upon the limitless track of discovery, and make tributary all the 
continents of knowledge. Let them study Geometry, for nothing exists like 
her demonstrations to teach us what it is to have a thing proved beyond all 
question or peradventure. Let them study Logic to sharpen their reasoning 
powers, and Grammar to discipline their powers of thought. Language 
opens the doors into other literatures, and furnishes the material for expres- 
sion. Rhetoric teaches us how to order this material aright. Astronomy 
tells the laws of planetary motion in the great concave above us ; Geology 
describes the making of the world beneath our feet ; Chemistry whispers of 
the secret constitution of the air we breathe. We study Physiology, to learn 
the wonderful mechanism of our bodies ; Psychology, to get some idea of the 






422 THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 

powers and processes of our minds. How .•shall we know the simplest facta 
of production and of commerce unless we have studied Political Economy ; 
how can the past, with the lessons of its Buffering and triumph, its progress 
and its failures, he other than a dreary blank to us, until we have read His- 
tory? Is there one of these thn.gs that a woman may not, should not, know? 
A bishop of the English church said, no long time ago: -Our girls are 
doubtless very badly educated, but our boys will never find it out." I 
would not advise our girls to trust him. Our boys are learning all these 
things, and they are beginning to be impatient of the babyish superstitions 
which the girls are cherishing, in place of knowledge. Girls can never be 
quite happy, when they suspect that boys arc laughing at them. The great 
philospher, Kant, tells us that women carry hooks, as they do watches. 
The watches do not go, or if they go, they go wrong. They carry them, he 
says, only that it may be seen that they have them. Now if 1 believed this 
were true, I should not have thought it worth while to speak to you to-day. 
I should scorn to appeal to the motive of vanity. I appeal to the loftier 
instincts of womanhood, to the desire to be true, to the love of knowledge 
for its own sake, to the longing to be of the highest use in the world, to the 
sacred ambition to attain likeness to Him in whose image we are made. 

And, with this motive, I do not know what learning may not be consecrated. 
I believe that a young woman ought to learn everything, ought to do every- 
thing. "It is an ill mason that refuses any stone," — so says the proverb. 
Thrust aside no experience or attainment as worthless, — some day it will be 
of value, — aye, all your life it will be of value, because it gives you confi- 
dence and the sense of power. Education, we have seen, is the drawing 
out, under proper nutriment and stimulus, of all the powers, — some, let us 
now say, with thoroughness; the rest, to the greatest extent consistent with 
the time at command and with the rightful claims of the more important. 
The young womau should know how to use her physical powers, and to keep 
them in working trim. Beauty itself is duty, — since health is beauty, and 
health is a matter of food and air and sleep and exercise. Every girl should 
learn to row a boat and to ride a horse. She may or may not have a voice 
and an ear, but she should at least learn the elements of music and be 
taught the correct method of singing. She may or may not possess the 
dramatic faculty, — she should at any rate train her elocutionary powers to 
a perfectly clear articulation, and learn to read aloud with propriety and 
expression. She may never be required to do the cooking of a family; 
nevertheless she ought to consider herself a helpless thing till she can make 
u loaf of bread. She may have her trousseau from Paris. — nevertheless she 
ought in an emergency to be able to make a dress. She may not be a book- 
keeper, — but she can easily learn to keep her household accounts ; she may 
never be a merchant's clerk,— hut she ought to know how to draw a check 
upon the bank, or to write a letter in simple business form. There is no 
ueed that she be a politician or a litterateur, — but one hour a day spent in 
judicious scanning of the morning paper, or of the last critical review, will 
enable her to be a perpetual source of brightness and inspiration in the 
family, and will make her conversation an educating, stimulating, refining 
influence, throughout a wide circle of friends. 

You have perceived, long since, that the education I am advocating is some- 



THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 423 

thing broader than the mere education of the school. It is nothing less than 
the healthful and symmetrical development of the whole being — a process 
which may begin in school days, but which requires for its completion the 
labor of a life. Much is accomplished in the school, in an informal way, 
that never could be done in regular classes and by set lessons. The scholar 
who has eyes and ears attent to learn may get in a whole stock of prepara- 
tion for life, while another is only dawdling. I value not least, in a School 
like this, that unconscious influence of example, shed continually by teachers 
and older scholars upon the younger and less mature, and transforming 
those on whom it falls, — I mean the influence of conversation, of temper, of 
demeanor, of tact and skill in entertaining guests, of generalship in admin- 
istration of affairs. There are young persons who get tenfold more of edu- 
cation from society, than they will ever get from books. What they read 
they forget; the living voice impresses itself upon their memories. I am 
not excusing the neglect of books, — that would be a grievous blunder, — I 
am only urging the improvement, to the utmost, of other opportunities 
which the school affords, side by side with its scholastic work. A modem 
thinker has said that the only empire freely conceded to women is that of 
manners, but that this is worth all the rest put together. It is worth all the 
rest put together, if by manners we mean the whole pervasive but nameless 
influence that breathes through movement and tone and speech and act; for 
out of the heart the mouth speaketh, and a good manner cannot be counter- 
feited, because it is the shadowy effluence of the soul itself. To say then 
that one of the great matters of education is the attainment of a good man- 
ner is only to say, in another form of words, that education ought to give to 
every woman the gentle and quiet spirit, the large aud calm intelligence, 
the quick sympathy, the modest self-confidence, the readiness upon emergency 
either to serve or to command, the constant setting of the claims of pleasure 
beneath the claims of duty, which constitute the genuinely Christian char- 
acter. It is the poet's picture over again: 

" A being breathing thoughtful breath, 
A traveler between life and death ; 
The reason firm, the temperate will, 
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill; 

•* A perfect woman, nobly planned, 
To warn, to comfort, to command; 
And yet a spirit still, and bright, 
With something of an angel light." 

Let us reverently acknowledge that for the production of such scholarship 
as this there will have to be something more than merely human teaching. 
But I think that, if we do our duty, we may depend on a higher wisdom to 
reinforce and supplement our efforts. The large-minded womanhood of 
which I have been speaking has its directory and text-book in a certain ven- 
erable volume of which we know. I am sorry that the only great classic in 
which our American colleges pretend to give no instruction is the Bible. In 
Germany, with all its rationalism, it is not so. "There are two books," says 
Pastor Braun to the boys of his Gymnasium, "there are two books, all the 
ins and outs of which you must learn here, — they are Homer and the Bible." 
I am thankful that, in this respect, our girls' schools are commonly better 
than our colleges. The one book better than all books, the one book from 






424 THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 

which more of <visdoin for the conduct of life can be drawn than from any 
or from all others combined, that one book is the Bible. Not Homer first 
and then the Bible, but the Bible first, and then all other books at an infinite 
remove. No education can be worthy of the name, which does not fill the 
soul with the knowledge and love of God and of his word. That alone can 
rectify our imperfect standards of judgment, fashion after the highest model 
of character, and send us out with a divine ambition to fill the lives of others 
with sweetness and beauty, to comfort the church of God, and to hasten the 
coming of the kingdom of truth and righteousness in the earth. 

Thus my thoughts with regard to woman's education have circled about 
the four ideas of Receptivity, Spontaneity, Thoroughness, Breadth. You 
have noticed that I have not regarded the education of woman as essentially 
different from the education of man. She is a human being before she is a 
woman, and nothing that affects humanity should be foreign to her. There 
is a common liberal education which we give to all young men. irrespective 
of the fact that some are to enter the law, and others to devote themselves to 
civil engineering. We allow some slight modification of this course, accord- 
ing to the vocation which one is to follow. He who is to be a physician may 
take a little more of Chemistry ; he who is to preach may take a little more 
of Greek. But to all we give substantially the same course, — to all we give 
the elements of a liberal culture. Now woman, as she is a human being, and 
therefore is man in the generic sense, has a valid claim to the same liberal 
culture which men enjoy. As she is not a man, but possessed of peculiar 
aptitudes and destined to a peculiar vocation, her course of training should 
be modified accordingly. She is the equal of man. — let her have as great 
advantages as he. She is different front man. — let her education be adapted 
to her idiosyncrasies and to her probable future work. If she have special 
gifts for Astronomy, let her by all means have the opportunity to study the 
higher mathematics and to calculate eclipses. If her tastes however be for 
literature and art, let her greatest strength be put forth in these. But. 
whatever be the minimum of required attainment for the young man, let that 
same be the minimum of required attainment for the young woman. Let 
liberal education for the young woman imply just as much of general train- 
ing as it does for the young man. 

An equal education, but not co-education. Physically the young woman 
is the weaker. She has her nervous force more at command, so that in 
competition with young men she can distance them for a time, but she gains 
this advantage only at fearful cost. The youth of study is followed by the 
age of nerves. The loss of health and spirits is poorly purchased by the 
higher examination marks. The acting President of one of our co-educating 
colleges told me that in his senior class there were three young women each 
one of whom was better than the best of the young men, but I told him that 
after-years were yet to be heard from. Let the aspiring girl resolve that 
she will secure a training equal in quantity and quality to the best which 
the schools for boys can give ; but then let her also lay down two funda- 
mental principles, first, that she will never set out to be a man, and secondly, 
that she will never attempt to do her work in the precise way in which men 
do. If she does, she will grasp after the shadow only to lose the substance 
of power, while her sceptre of womanly persuasion and delicate sympathy 



THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 



425 



will have passed from her forever. Fifty years ago, a class of girls prepared 
for Harvard College and passed their Grammar School examinations as sat- 
isfactorily as the boys with whom they had been studying. They applied 
to President Quincy for admission. "Well, President Quincy, you feel 
sure the trustees will let us come, don't you?" "Oh, by no means," replied 
he, 'this is a place only for men." Whereupon the young miss of sixteen, 
who had been speaker for the rest, burst into tears, and exclaimed with 
vehemence: "'I wish I could annihilate the women, and let the men have 
everything to themselves!" I am glad she did not get her wish. What 
would have become of us, if she had? I am glad that our oldest and fore- 
most University still prefers simultaneous education to co-education, — the 
offering of equal advantages to all without regard to sex, rather than the 
training of young women and young men together. 

I am of course entirely prepared to hear that my scheme is a purely ideal 
one, and that, until the physical powers of young women are much greater 
than we see them now, and until these same young women are willing to 
postpone marriage a full ten years, the attainment of such a standard of 
education is wildly impracticable. This leads me to say that I am not 
unmindful of the great difficulties in the way. Let me mention some of 
them, and as I mention them, let me suggest methods for their removal. 
The first, and perhaps the chief, is found in the absurd elementary training 
that is now furnished equally to our boys and girls. No one who looks back 
to his own childhood can fail to perceive that under a competent teacher the 
work of his first twelve years might easily have been put into nine, and that 
with less of cost to nerve and brain than he actually had to pay. When we 
read of the training which James Mill gave to his son John Stuart, and 
which the historian Niebuhr received from his father, we begin to recog- 
nize that our own lack of early proficiency was not wholly due to native 
stupidity, but to a wrong conception on the part of our early teachers of the 
work to be done. At ten years of age Niebuhr knew his eight languages, 
and Mill was discussing logical problems with his father. The best speci- 
mens of the Kindergarten are showing how much can be accomplished in 
giving an elementary knowledge of natural science to children of five and 
six. A celebrated professor at Vassar, on a certain picnic occasion, was 
startled to hear his own children calling to him to come and play geology 
with them. They were taking a day of sport, to play over again what they 
played at the Kindergarten. The professor's department was a different one 
from that of geology, and he was obliged to confess himself too ignorant of 
the subject to play comfortably with his own children. The son of one of 
my old college teachers was looking over a text-book of chemistry. The 
boy's age was six years. Father and mother were both in the room, though 
both were busy with their own work. The small boy broke the silence with 
the question : "Father, do you think there is any bicarbonate of soda in the 
pantry?" The father without much reflection replied, "I think not, my 
son," and turned again to his work. A few moments passed, when the boy 
spoke again: "Mother, do you think there is any bicarbonate of soda in the 
pantry?" The mother, much more decidedly: "No. my son, I think not," 
and turned to her work. The boy of six pondered deeply, and at last was 
heard to say: "Father thinks there is none there, because he does n't know 



426 THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 

anything about the pantry; and mother thinks there is n't any there, because 
she does n't know anything about chemistry." 

Improved methods of training will do much to shorten the time spent in 
the drudgery of acquiring mere rudiments, and will fit the child to enter 
upon work that will elicit interest and will be done for its own sake. I 
believe that there are many things which must be taught during the first 
five year's of the child's life or never. Among them is elocution — or at 
least the most important part of it, a clear articulation and a pure tone. In 
many an American family where final syllables are clipped, vowels short- 
ened, and consonants half pronounced, an English nurse, with the full, 
clear enunciation so often found even among servants in England, would 
give the children simply by the unconscious influence of example and with- 
out any formal training, a lesson in elocution that a life-time would be too 
short to unlearn. It is a question, indeed, whether the pronunciation of the 
foreign languages is not best learned in childhood in the same way. One 
of my New York acquaintances employed a French nurse for his children, 
with peremptory instructions never to say to them an English word. The 
experiment was continued until the children did their quarreling in French, 
because that was most natural to tLem. A German nurse was then substi- 
tuted for the French. The remarkable facility of the traveled and educated 
Russian in the speaking of languages not his own is due, not so much 
to any natural linguistic gift, as to this training in childhood. The child 
catches, as by instinct, the language that is spoken about him, whereas in 
later years the same acquisition would be made at great cost of time and 
labor, and many American parents residing on the Continent have been put 
out to find how much more quickly and how much more accurately their little 
children learned a language than they themselves did. 

There has been some progress in our public schools, since we were chil- 
dren. It has been progress in accuracy and thoroughness, in a limited range. 
It is very questionable whether it has been progress in breadth, in develop- 
ment of thinking power, in real love for knowledge. The variety of the old 
curriculum was stimulating, and the teacher was apt to be wakened up by 
the variety of the things he taught. The modern principle of division of 
labor, which condemns the teacher to a narrow round, endlessly troddeu, 
tends to make teaching mechanical. The vivida vis is absent from it. The 
result is a sort of technical learning on the part of the scholar, which has 
little connection with life. We have still in our schools such relics of barbar- 
ism as the compulsory writing out of a thousand words after school, as a 
penalty for disorder, and the compulsory learning, in their order, of a whole 
column of words arbitrarily following each other in the spelling-book. And 
as for power to write an intelligent letter, or to give account in grammatical 
language of a simple incident of every-day life, that is rare among the schol- 
ars of our public schools. We are all familiar with the investigation into 
the nature of the instruction at Quincy, Mass., which was conducted a few 
years ago by Mr. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and the amazing ignorance 
with regard to the simplest practical matters which was found to exist 
among the older scholars of the public schools. The result of that exposure 
was the entire reconstruction of the system of public instruction, the retire- 
ment of certain fossilized officials, the abolition of the old plan of mere 



THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 427 

memorizing from text-books, and the adoption of a new method which sub- 
stitutes Instruction for mere hearing of recitations, brings the personality 
of the teacher into living contact with the scholar, and tests the value of the 
student's acquirements by his power to put the principles he learns to use 
in ways such as he is likely to use them in after life. I am happy to say 
that a lady of intelligence, in one of our neighboring towns, who had hecome 
convinced of the utter Inadequacy of the ordinary school methods of that 
town, has introduced the Quincy system there, has imported teachers who 
had learned the art at Quincy, ha^ secured the building of a school-house 
at private expense, has seen it filled with scholars, financially prosperous, 
and already producing such results that children of ten seem to be further 
advanced in powers of thought and expression than those of fifteen used to 
he. When such elementary training for both boys and girls shall become 
common, one of the great obstacles in the way of my general scheme for the 
education of young women will be removed. 

Another difficulty with which woman's education has to contend, is that 
it does not extend over a sufficient period of time. Indeed, we may say 
that it commonly stops just when it has fairly begun. In this respect it 
dilTcrs very greatly from the best training given to young men. Only when 
the young man has mastered the elements of knowledge, and got command 
of the instruments of investigation, can he be said fairly to begin to think 
for himself. This period usually comes at the end of the Junior year in Col- 
lege, when he enters upon the broader studies of the Senior. Then he per- 
ceives for the first time the use of his past acquisitions. Intellectual and 
Moral Philosophy, Political Economy, Constitutional and International Law, 
the Philosophy of History — all these give him an outlook that is novel and 
inspiring. Or perchance, this recognition of himself as a free-born citizen 
in the great republic of letters begins only with his entrance upon the studies 
of his chosen profession. Then first he feels himself a man, bound to form 
judgments for himself, and deeply interested in knowing all that can be 
known about the art and mystery of theology, or medicine, or law. Then 
he finds himself, not only in possession of the discipline needed in conduct- 
ing research for himself — the result of long continued and often irksome 
labors, — but he has also a physique hardened and vigorous and matured — 
a physique which he can subject to long continued strain without fear that 
it will break. In fine, the conditions of a real education are now for the 
first time in existence, and the results of three or four years of work are 
surprising. The youth changes into the man. These last years are worth 
all the rest put together. 

Compare with this the intellectual history of the young woman, even 
under circumstances which are apt to be considered exceptionally favorable. 
Until she is eighteen, nineteen, or twenty, her physical system is not in its 
best estate, — indeed, the dangers attending a long-continued strain upon it 
are very great, as is proved by the multitude of wrecked constitutions which 
result from our present high-pressure system of education. Until she is 
twenty, she has not the physical strength for the hardest study. But — what 
is equally important to my purpose — she has not the maturity of mind. 
She has quick memory, but what she learns goes as quickly from her, for 
lack of time to reflect upon it, and for lack of understanding of its imporfc 






428 THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 

ance. She has susceptibility and enthusiasm, but these are not yet under 
control of a dominant purpose. She does not know what to do with her 
powers, even if she hail the will. She reaches the age at last when she has 
strength of body, discipline of her powers, maturity of judgment, — the age 
corresponding to that at which the young man first enters upon a real self- 
centered growth, the age at which she herself la fairly prepared to begin 
study, the age when three or four years would make her thoroughly accom- 
plished, genuinely self-reliant, broadly thoughtful, in short truly educated, 
— and just then and there she stops her intellectual work, turns her back on 
study, leaves her school, leaves behind her all this fund of discipline, am! 
devotes herself to society and to embroidery. There is no end of young ladies 
who can show only a single thousand-dollar polka or nocturne as the net 
result of eight or nine years of musical training. And so. in more purely 
literary and scientific work, the tools are sharpened at great cost through 
years of labor, only to be allowed at the end of those years to lie and rust. 
Of course we know what does it all. The mind of parents and daughters 
alike is prepossessed with the idea that the age of twenty or twenty-two is 
the fit age for marriage. If the idea of fitness for marriage could only 
supersede this, it would be well for us. We have heard a great deal of 
advice about early marriages. They are encouraged by the public press. 
Well, we have the principle most fully exemplified in Siam, where a girl is 
betrothed at six and married at twelve. But civilization changes all this. 
It teaches us that the young woman should be educated, before she is mar- 
ried. And when we in America recognize, as fully as our English cousins 
do, that the fit age for marriage is not twenty, but rather twenty-five, we 
shall see the removal of the second great hindrance in the way of woman's 
education. 

But now I must speak of a last hindrance, which is almost as serious. I 
mean the indifference of the average young woman to the means of culture 
within her reach. You will bear me witness that I do not regard education 
as a mere matter of the schools. It has to do with the whole woman, and 
with all life. For this reason, even those who leave school may still continue 
the process of self-training, — indeed no school education is of much value 
which does not form the habit of study, and make it a part of the very being. 
We shall have better educated women, when those we have are bent, school 
or no school, on securing the development of all their powers, on filling up 
the gaps in their knowledge, on knowing the what and the why in all depart- 
ments of human activity. For this reason, travel is a great means of educa- 
tion. It forces things upon the attention which, merely read of, would not 
interest. Herbert Spencer has well said, that other things being equal, that 
individual and that nation makes greatest advance movement which has had 
ihe greatest variety of environment. Education is a very different thing 
from scholarship. There is a discipline of the faculties which comes from 
• onstant contact with men and women of varied temperaments and culture. 
By all means let us have scholarship. — but let us supplement it by knowl- 
edge of the world. Otherwise it will be narrow and unsympathetic. The 
educated woman may not be a scholar, but sho may know the best in litera- 
ture and art; may have her taste cultivated by seeing the best pictures and 
by hearing the best music ; may have a large and loving regard for human 



THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 429 

nature everywhere, because she has seen in it so much of good, and at the 
same time a power of estimating character and of distinguishing the true 
from the false, because her enthusiasm of humanity has been tempered by 
comparison of a multitude of actual examples. And here, as in the case of 
young men, lies the undeniable advantage of great schools. They consti- 
tute 1 world in themselves. Their inmates learn from one another. There is 
an enlargement of the individual as the individual feels merged in the great 
body. The silent, constant influence of the multitude of scholars is ever 
with us, like the pressure of the atmosphere, powerfully supporting us and 
furthering our effort even when we feel it least. If I could also say that 
these great bodies of students were free from lawlessness of opinion and of 
manner, I should think their influence wholly a good. It is only a qualified 
approbation I can give, with the admonition that the young woman who 
spends years of her life in such companionship should be self-centered, with 
principles and even manners in large degree formed, lest the school senti- 
ment override the society sentiment, and conventionalities lose their true 
aspect of rationality. To become rude and mannish, to lose the gentle and 
quiet spirit, t\> learn forth-putting and egotism, this would be too large a 
price to pay for any merely intellectual advantage. In Mrs. Kemble's auto- 
biography published three years ago, she tells us that more than once, when 
looking from her reading-desk over the sea of faces uplifted towards her, a 
sudden feeling seized her that she must say something from herself to all 
those human beings whose attention she felt at that moment entirely at her 
command, and between whom and herself a sense of sympathy thrilled pow- 
erfully and strangely through her heart, as she looked steadfastly at them 
before opening her lips. But she adds that on wondering afterwards what 
she might, could, would or should have said to them from herself, she never 
could think of anything but two words: "Be good!" 

Frances Power Cobbe, in her recent essay on the fitness of woman for 
the ministry of religion, quotes this remark of Mrs. Kemble as indicat- 
ing that women of genius feel within them an impulse to use their powers 
of emotion and expression in public address. I draw from it the opposite 
conclusion, that the most gifted women feel the incongruity of assuming to 
be teachers in the pulpit or upon the platform. There were prophetesses 
of old, indeed; a Jean d'Arc roused France against the invader; a Mrs. 
Booth, of the Salvation Army, is the most effective preacher in England. 
But publicity must be justified, not as the rule, but as an exception to the 
rule. Quiet ways for the most are best. And in these quiet ways the edu- 
cation of a woman best proceeds. I am persuaded that it is in the power of 
every woman to educate herself. However small her present attainments 
may be, if she will but regularly devote to the reading of good literature a 
single hour in each day, this simple habit will in the progress of years give 
her an education which will qualify her to exert a real and beneficent influ- 
ence on the tone of society around her. One such woman I have known. 
The cares of a large household have not broken in upon her devotion of this 
one hour to the improvement of her mind. Her example is an incitement 
and stimulus to the young, — her conversation Is elevating to the circle in 
which she moves. It seems an easy thing to compass this self -education. 
But will the average woman of our time do it? No, she has not time. She 



430 THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN. 

can spend hours in making and receiving calls, hours in the details of house- 
hold management, hours in shopping and in the preparation of her dress, — 
but one hour a day for communion with the master minds of all time she 
cannot give, — it is enough for her if she succeeds in reading her Bible and 
in saying her prayers. Still, she that has ears to hear, let her hear. There 
\'j the ideal. She who strives after it will surely accomplish more than she 
who gives up the struggle is despair. 

Marheinecke tells us that we need never fear that women will become too 
learned. Learned women, he says, only need husbands who are more learned 
than themselves. I wish I could assure each woman who loves knowledge 
that the kind fates would entangle the thread of her life with that of some 
man who knows more than she. But all I can promise is that she will 
deserve it. And whatever may betide, this stands fast,— the ambition to 
reach the noblest heights of womanhood, to compass the widest fields of- 
knowledge, to wield the largest influence for good, to bring the grandest 
tribute of praise to Him who created and redeemed mankind, — this is to 
attain the end of her being, and to fulfill the purpose for which God created 
her and sent her into the world. Each one of us is a separate creature of 
God, and each one's work, however solitary it may be, or however linked 
in with the work of others, has yet an individuality of its own, a special 
type of God's creative wisdom to reflect, a special destiny to fulfill. There 
are capacities within you which are unlike tho^e of any other human crea- 
ture; there is a task set for you to accomplish such as no angel or arch- 
angel can perform in your stead ; there is an honor you can render to Him 
who made you which only you in all the universe can give. Wait not then 
for any other, but take up your burden and push on. "'Trust no future, 
howe'er pleasant," — but act to-day. Remember that we cannot put our 
finger on the moment, and say: "This is present." While we say it, it is 
gone. There is no present, — only past and future. The world is moving 
down that future in one grand harmony. The universe is revolving round 
the throne of God, and every star is singing, as it whirls and shines. Let 
us not break in upon that solemn music with the jingling of "rings on our 
fingers and bells on our toes;" but, keeping time to the movement of the 
rolling anthem, let us, with God's help, add one concordant note, however 
faint and low, to the grand harmony of universal life I 



XLIII. 

REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE: THE LAW OF THE 
STATE AND THE LAW OF SCRIPTURE/ 



What is the proper attitude of the churches toward persons divorced for 
their own fault and then marrying again? It mny give definiteness to my 
discussion, if I put the question more concretely. Let me instance a case, 
— whether it be a real one or not is nothing to my present purpose. 

A mnn is divorced by a New York Court upon the ground of his own adul- 
tery — an adultery committed after the offender has been admitted to mem- 
bership in a church, let me say, in a Baptist church ; committed, however, 
three or four years before what he now believes to have been his real con- 
version. The New York statute forbids him to marry again. But immedi- 
ately after this divorce, and in order to evade the prohibition of the New 
York law, he crosses the line into the State of Connecticut, where parties 
divorced for any cause may lawfully remarry, and in Connecticut he marries 
another wife. Bringing this second wife back at once into the State of New 
York, he begins preaching to a Baptist church, has apparent success in his 
work, and after a time applies to be regularly ordained as a Baptist minister. 
The question now arises, What answer the Baptist church, and the Council 
composed of representatives of Baptist churches, shall make to his applica- 
tion? I propose to examine his status, both according to the laws of this 
State and according to the law of Christ, and this, not for the sake of deter- 
mining upon a particular case, so much as for the sake of setting forth the 
principles which should govern our ministers and our churches in their 
response to similar applications. This examination may suggest to us the 
need of more definite interpretation of our present laws, if not of important 
modification of them. 

The Revised Statutes of New York provide that: 

"No second or other subsequent marriage shall be contracted by any per- 
son during the lifetime of any former husband or wife of such person, unless 
the marriage with such former husband or wife shall have been annulled 
or dissolved for some cause other than the adultery of such person.-" "Every 
marriage contracted in violation of the provision of this section shall [with 
an exception where one of the parties has been absent five years, etc.} be 
absolutely void." (2 Rev. Stat., 139, § 5). 

At first sight this statute would seem to settle the legal status of the per- 
son whose case we are considering, and to determine that he is now living 
with a person who, according to the laws of this State, is not his wife. And 
so certain of the Courts of inferior jurisdiction have decided. In the case 
of Marshall vs. Marshall (2 Hun, 238), Mr. Justice Westbrook, of the 



* Printed in the Examiner, February 17 and February 24, 1881. 
431 






432 REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 

Supreme Court, held to be null and void a marriage contracted in Pennsyl- 
vania by a man who had been previously divorced in New York for his own 
adultery, and who immediately after his remarriage in Pennsylvania resumed 
his residence in this State. The principle was here asserted that the validity 
of a marriage is to be determined, not by the law of the place where the 
marriage is contracted, but by the law of the place which constitutes the 
domicil or actual residence of the parties who contract the marriage. Judge 
Davis concurred in this opinion, though Judge Daniels, for reasons which 
we shall consider hereafter, dissented. 

On the last "Wednesday of the year just closed, in New York city, as the 
newspapers inform us, Judge Sedgwick, in the case of Gould H. Thorp vs. 
Laura M. Thorp, followed this majority opinion of the general term just 
mentioned, and dismissed the suit for divorce on the ground that the mar- 
riage was itself void. Mr. Thorp was first married in 1855. In 1861 the 
couple was separated by absolute divorce, and several years later Mr. Thorp, 
though lying under the prohibition of the New York Court, married in Phil- 
adelphia the defendant in the present suit. By Judge Sedgwick's decision, 
the defendant has not been a wife. In a similar case in North Carolina, 
where a divorced wife, in order to evade the North Carolina law, went into 
another State and there married, the marriage was declared null and void 
(Williams vs. Oates, 5 Iredell, N. C, 535). 

In all these cases, the decisions of the Courts have implied that the mere 
transfer of one's person or of one's goods to another State for the purpose 
of securing a divorce does not give a man domicil in that State, nor alter in 
the least the claims of his own State law upon him. This principle a New 
Jersey Court has affirmed in determining upon an application for divorce, 
refusing to regard as domiciled in New Jersey any suitor whose manifest 
purpose in sojourning in that State is only to get a divorce (Winship vs. 
Winship, 1 C. E. Green, 107-110). It is a settled rule of law that there can 
be no jurisdiction without domicil, and it may be safely asserted as an infer- 
ence from it, however Legislatures or Courts may have been tempted to 
ignore it, that in order to give the applicant for divorce a standing in the 
Courts of any State, there must be the fixed purpose of not returning to the 
place of his original residence, in case this residence was previously in 
another State (Bishop, Marriage and Divorce, 2: 122). 

To make my statement more complete, it should be mentioned that in 1879 
the Legislature of New York so modified the law of divorce, as to grant the 
guilty party liberty to marry again, upon furnishing to the Court decreeing 
the divorce sufficient proof that the complainant has remarried, that five 
years have elapsed from the date of the decree, and that the conduct of the 
defendant since the decree has been uniformly good (Laws of New York, 
1S79: 321). This modification of the statute has been so recent that only a 
single case has, to my knowledge, thus far come before our Courts. Though 
this case is a very different one from that which we are examining, there is 
a lesson to be learned from it which may help our present investigation. 

In December, 1S79, on petition of one Green, who had been divorced for 
his own adultery, and who professed to bring evidence of five years' subse- 
quent good conduct, Judge Gilbert, of Brooklyn, granted the applicant 
liberty to marry again. It was afterwards found that prior to his divorce 



REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 433 

he had already married again, and that after the divorce from the first wife 
he had deserted the second. His application to the Court for permission to 
marry again was made in order that he might marry yet a third person, who 
at the time had a husband still living with whom he had agreed to 'trade 
wives." I am happy, to say that, upon these facts being represented to the 
Court, the permission to remarry was revoked. But the case shows the ease 
with which, especially in a great city, evidence of so-called 'good conduct" 
can be procured by very immoral persons, and what shameful results may 
follow even the partial repeal of our only penalty for adultery, namely, the 
prohibition of remarriage. 

Thus the New York Revised Statutes until 1ST9 absolutely forbade the 
remarriage of the guilty party to a divorce during the life-time of the inno- 
cent complainant, and the main judicial decision under the statute had 
declared null and void a marriage contracted outside of tbis State in order 
to evade the prohibition of our law. From this last decision, however, there 
lay a possible appeal, but so far as I am able to learn, the case was not car- 
ried up. and the question at issue had not been finally adjudicated by the 
Court of Appeals. There are not wanting persons who claim that the judg 
ment in the case of Marshall vs. Marshall, to which we have referred, is 
not warranted by the law as it stands. 

An able essay recently published (Albany Laic Journal, June IS, 1880: 
4S6— 4SS) takes this ground. It maintains that the law of marriage is a part 
of international law. and that from its very nature marriage must have a 
legal ubiquity of operation. As in a civil contract the law of the place of 
contract prevails over the law of the domicil, so the validity of a marriage is 
to be decided by the law of the place where it is celebrated. If valid there, 
it is valid everywhere. This general rule can indeed be modified in Massa- 
chusetts. There the statute expressly declares null and void the remarriage 
of the guilty party to a divorce decreed in Massachusetts, even when this 
remarriage takes place outside of the State, and Chief Justice Gray admitted 
in one of his decisions that, but for this express prohibition of the statute, 
marriage contracted in evasion of the laws of that Commonwealth would not 
be invalid. But in the New York statute there is no express declaration that 
such marriages contracted outside of the State shall be null and void. Upon 
the principle, therefore, that penal laws can have no force outside of the ter- 
ritory which enacts them, and that the statute can apply to foreign marriages 
only in case of a special prohibition, which here is certainly not expressed, 
it is argued that the Courts of New York must recognize as valid even the 
remarriage of its own divorced citizens, provided this marriage has been 
valid according to the law of the State in which it was contracted. 

This principle of interpretation, if it were true, would settle the legitimacy 
of the marriage we are considering. — for it is beyond question that according 
to the law of Connecticut, where that marriage was contracted, the whole 
procedure was formally correct. How much of authority is there for this 
view? We have a decision of the Tennessee Supreme Court which is in 
point. The Tennessee law makes it a felony for any person to marry who 
has a former husband or wife living. — yet the Tennessee Court did not hold 
a woman, divorced in Kentucky and forbidden by Kentucky law to marry, 
to have violated any law when she evaded the Kentucky statute by marrying 
• 28 



434 REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 

in Tennessee (Bishop, 2: 701) ; in other words, a person forbidden to marry 
in one State may lawfully marry in another. 

In the ease of Ponsford vs. Johnson (2 Blatch. 51), the United States 
Circuit Court asserted that a marriage contract would be valid, even if both 
parties should go into another State for the express purpose of evading the 
law of New York ; and Judge Macomber, of the New York Supreme Court, 
has very recently decided, in the case of Kerhson vs. Kerrison, that the 
petitioner for the annulling of a marriage of this sort in another State could 
claim nothing of the Court, so long as she could not come with clean hands, 
that is, show that she was not herself a party to this evasion of the New 
York law (Albany Law Journal, Dec. 25, 18^0 : 502). In denying the peti- 
tion, Judge Macomber expressed himself as agreeing with the dissenting 
opinion of Judge Daniels in the Marshall case, that the validity of a mar- 
riage is to be determined solely by the law of the place where the marriage 
was contracted. 

In his well-known work on Marriage ami Divorce, Bishop, after citing 
the two cases first mentioned in this paragraph, sums up the whole matter 
in the following words : 

"Thus it is held that, notwithstanding this statute, if a person divorced 
in New York goes into another State and there marries, the marriage is 
good in New York." 
And in other places, with reference to the same matter, he declares that 

"No New York statute should be construed to repeal or change inter- 
national law." "It is a question whether all prohibitions of marriage to 
the divorced party should not be construed as operating merely by way of 
penalty, not as rendering the marriage void, unless express words of nullity 
are employed." (Bishop, 2:703). 

We have now got before us whatever of argument and of authority has 
been thus far adduced in favor of the proposition that the New York Courts 
are compelled to recognize as valid those marriages which have been con- 
tracted in other States in defiance of their decrees. It is interesting to see 
that much of this argument was anticipated, and that at least an attempt 
was made to answer it, in the first and the chief case which has come before 
our Courts — the case of Marshall vs. Marshall, already twice alluded to. In 
his decision, Judge Westbrook replied to the assertion that, without express 
declarations of the statute that such foreign marriages were null and void, 
they must be held valid — replied by citing the celebrated case of Brook vs. 
Brook in the English House of Lords. Here an Englishman had gone to 
Denmark to marry his deceased wife's sister. Lord Chancellor Campbell 
pronounced the marriage null and void, although there was no special pro- 
hibition of foreign marriages of this sort in the English statute, and pro- 
nounced it null and void upon the ground that the law of the domicil 
followed the parties. Judge Daniels, in his dissenting opinion, attempted 
to offset Judge Westbrook's citation by remarking that Lord Chancellor 
Campbell was led to his conclusion by the fact that, according to English 
law, such marriage of a deceased wife's sister is an incestuous marriage, and 
so, opposed to the ecclesiastical policy of the kingdom. But. so far as 
appears, this consideration was not mentioned by the Lord Chancellor, and 
no intimation is given that the same rule of domicil would not apply to any 
other attempt to evade English law by marriage abroad. 

Judge Westbrook's decision goes on to say that no other rule than that 



REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 435 

which he enforces will enable a State to make its own laws of marriage and 
divorce effectual, and place that relation beyond the legislation of others. 
Story, in his Conflict of Laws, approves of this rule, and declares that, 
otherwise, "'there is produced a state of anarchy and confusion upon the 
subject of this fundamental relation of society, whereby any State may be 
compelled to recognize the perfect validity and binding force of polygamous 
marriages." 1 may add to this statement of Story that to grant that mar- 
riage is to be judged solely by the law of the place of contract might 
conceivably compel the Courts of New York to recognize as lawfully married 
all the forty wives of Brigham Young, or the three thousand of the King of 
Dahomey. Incestuous and polygamous marriages must certainly be excepted 
from the operation of this rule. Is it not a serious question whether mar- 
riages contracted outside this State in fraud of our laws are not also to be 
excepted from its operation? 

Since the cases which have been cited have none of them been carried up 
to the highest judicial tribunal, it becomes matter of great interest to know 
what view would probably be taken of them by the Court of Appeals. There 
are two official utterances of this Court which bear upon the present subject. 
Mr. Justice Johnson, by way of dictum, not of decision, has said of this 
statute prohibiting the remarriage of the guilty party to divorce (Cropsey 
vs. Ogdcn, 1 Kernan, 22S, 235, 236) : 

"Its subject-matter is the prohibition of marriages within this State to 
certain persons who come within its terms. It covers the case of one mar- 
ried abroad and divorced abroad for his own adultery, just as plainly as it 
does the case of a marriage and. divorce for the same cause here." 

Again, in the case of The People vs. Baker (76 N. Y., p. 78), in which 
the defendant had pleaded as a bar to his conviction for bigamy that a 
divorce had been decreed against him in Ohio for his own adultery, though 
at the time of the decree he was an actual resident of this State, our Court 
of highest resort, Mr. Justice Folger delivering the judgment, decided the 
New York Court could not allow the status of one of its own citizens to be 
determined by the laws or decisions of Ohio ; in other words, the Ohio 
divorce might be valid in Ohio and as respects the party that resided there, 
but it could have no force in New York and as respects the party that 
resided here. The effect of this decision is the present incarceration in the 
Penitentiary of a man who, before his second marriage, and while residing 
here, had been divorced from his first wife in Ohio. 

New York, in short, will not judge the divorces of its citizens by any 
other law than its own. But by the same rule, must not New York refuse 
to judge the marriages of its citizens by any other law than its own? 
Judge Folger does not say that marriages contracted outside this State in 
order to evade the prohibition of the New York statute, will be null and 
void, but it seems to me that this conclusion is implied in his reasoning. If 
the law of the domicil prevails in case of a divorce decreed against one of 
our citizens by the Court of another State, then the law of the domicil 
ought also to prevail in case of a marriage contracted by one of our citizens 
in another State; and, since New York is the domicil and New York law 
declares the marriage invalid, the Court of Appeals would, in consistency, 
seem compelled to decide that such marriage is null and void. 



436 REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 

Although, as has been seen, I am inclined to regard this as the intent of 
the law, and although the tendency of the judicial decisions seems to me to 
be in this direction, there are many competent critics (as Bishop, 2: 703), 
who deny that the law of domicil applies to marriage, even if it applies to 
divorce. For my own part, I must confess that the question whether such 
marriages are invalid is yet open to doubt — a doubt which has already led, 
and may still lead, to very unfortunate practical consequences. But what- 
ever doubt may exist with regard to the nullity of such marriages, there can 
be no doubt as to one thing, — the guilty party to a divorce, who marries 
again, is a law-breaker, and though the Courts may possibly be compelled, 
according to our present law, to recognize his unlawful marriage as valid, yet 
he is under judicial ban, and may be made to suffer for his wrong doing. 

It is to be feared, however, that in practice this suffering will be slight. 
It seems on the whole, probable that such transgressors will practically go 
unwhipped of justice. To marry again contrary to the express decree of the 
Court, provided it be done in some other State where the marriage of the 
guilty party to divorce is lawful, will, of course, not be recognized as bigamy 
by the New York Courts, at least where the divorce has been granted in this 
State. It is a violation of New York laws and a misdemeanor, but it is not 
bigamy. This Judge Folger declares, in the decision just alluded to. The 
reason is set forth in the case of The People vs. Eovey (5 Barb., 117), 
and the reason is that divorce frees both parties. There cannot be a wife 
without a husband, nor a husband without a wife. If divorce makes both 
parties once more single, then neither party in marrying again can be called 
guilty of either bigamy, polygamy, or adultery, and therefore cannot be 
punished for any one of these crimes. 

As a matter of fact there is no punishment, except in cases where the 
offender is compelled to ask for some relief from the Court whose decree he 
has violated, and on account of his contempt of court is refused. We have 
before us, indeed, the spectacle of a Judge of one of our metropolitan tri- 
bunals, who in defiance of a decree of the Courts, has contracted a foreign 
marriage, and who still, with soiled ermine, attempts to administer to others 
the justice which he himself has treated with derision. So far as pains and 
penalties are concerned, the prohibition of the Courts is only a brutum 
fulmen, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." And thus our 
society is taught contempt for law. Is it not evident that we need both a 
final judicial interpretation and a legislative modification of our present 
law, which shall on the one hand give it the definiteness of the law of 
Massachusetts, so that marriages contracted in evasion of our statutes shall 
be expressly declared null and void, and on the other hand shall ordain 
fixed pains and penalties for disobedience to our judicial decrees? * 



* Since the above was written, decisions have been rendered by the Court 
of Appeals of the State of New York, as follows : — 

October 4, 1881, in the case of VanVoorhis vs. BrintnaU (86 N. Y., p. 
18), to the effect that prohibition of remarriage has no effect outside this 
State, and does not render invalid such remarriage. The child of such 
second marriage, born in this State, is legitimate. 

December 2S, 1882, in the case of Thorp vs. Thorp (90 A T . Y., p. 602), to 
the effect that marriage valid under the law of another State in which it was 
contracted is valid also in New York, even though it was contracted in 



REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 437 

But what the law of the State, on account of its present defects, may not 
be able to punish, public opinion, and especially Christian sentiment, can 
punish and ought to punish. From the law of the State, therefore, I appeal 
to the law of Scripture. 

It is a remarkable evidence of the profound view which the Hebrew nation 
had attained of the sanctity of the marriage relation, that the adulterer was 
not simply divorced, — the penalty was death. Such was the provision of 
the Mosaic law ; and although the corruption of the Jewish people led to 
wide departures from the original idea of marriage as the union of one man 
and one woman, and divorce for trifling causes was permitted, we are to 
remember that this was "for the hardness of their hearts," and that "from 
the beginning it was not so." 

Yet even during these days of obduracy there was a beneficent and disci- 
plinary effect resulting from the Mosaic legislation. While the wife had no 
right of divorce, and might be put away for uncleanness, she could not be 
dismissed except by the writing and the delivery of a bill of divorcement. 
This was intended, as a late writer remarks, "to restrain a bad practice 
which had gone far to annul the original law of marriage, and which still 
prevails among the Arabs, who by a word may dissolve the marriage tie. 
To correct this custom, Moses allows a wife to be divorced only by a legal 
document, and forbids her husband to take her back after she has been 
married to another." As in those times the preparation of such a document 
was not the easiest or commonest of tasks, this provision of the law pro- 
tected the wife, by giving time for the husband's anger to cool ; while the 
permission accorded the woman to marry again, and the irrevocableness of 
the decision when once made, put serious hinderances in the way of sudden 
and unjust separations. 

It is not, however, to the Mosaic law that I refer, when I speak of the 
Scriptural teaching with regard to marriage and divorce, but to the original 



disobedience of the prohibition of the New York Court, and was contracted 
in that other State for the purpose of evading the New York law. 

October 7, 1884, in the case of Erkenbrach vs. Erkenbrach (96 N. Y., p. 
456), to the effect that Courts in New York have no common law jurisdiction 
over the subject of divorce, their authority being confined altogether to the 
exercise of such express and incidental powers as are conferred by statute. 

December 22, 1885, in the case of O'Dea vs. O'Dea (101 N. Y., p. 23), 
to the effect that a husband, married in this State, deserted by his wife, 
and obtaining a divorce in Ohio, the marriage of the wife subsequently to 
another man in this State is declared to be void. 

These decisions make it plain that the hope expressed when the above 
article was written has not been realized, and that one of our most re- 
spected Justices declares himself none too strongly, when, in a letter to the 
author, he speaks of these same decisions as illustrating "the wretched con- 
dition of the law in regard to the important relations to which they refer." 

In the last case cited, the Court of Appeals has itself added a most sig- 
nificant comment. It is as follows: "In other States, judgments contrary 
to the authorities followed in this State have been rendered. This conflict 
of opinion, however much to be regretted, continues, and it yet remains for 
some ultimate authority to relieve the point from the difficulties now at- 
tending it. and determine the civil rights of parties whose relations, as 
legally defined by different State tribunals are liable to be regarded on one 
side of the State line as matrimonial, and on the other side as meretricious." 

May we not add further, that national legislation seems the only remedy 
for this conflict of State laws, and that such legislation, if constitutional 
and practicable, would be a most worthy subject for debate and settlement 
by Congress? 



438 REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 

law of the marriage relation, instituted at the Creation, to which Christ g:.e. 
back, as to the ultimate norm and authority, and of which we have an expo 
sition in his own words and in the words of his apostles. In this original 
Institution of marriage there is an unmistakable intention to define it as the 
union of two, and of two only, so that they become, as it were, one being, 
and that for life. "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, 
and shall cleave unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh." 

When Christ comes to expound these words, it is plain that he regards 
the union as dissoluble only by death, or by that which, as respects the 
meaning and purpose of the relation, is the same as death. Let us take the 
fullest report of his teaching on the subject, in Matthew 19 : 9, by which we 
may fairly interpret the more condensed utterances in the other evangelists. 
"Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall 
marry another, committeth adultery, and whoso marrieth her which is put 
away, doth commit adultery." Here it is plain that fornication — a general 
term implying an outward act wrought with a third person, a term, more- 
over, which includes adultery, interrupted or complete, or any of the unnamo- 
able and abominable vices — is, according to Christ's law, the sole valid 
ground of divorce. 

It has been held by the Roman Catholic Church, otherwise so strict in 
matters of divorce, that the apostle Paul modifies Christ's teaching by allow- 
ing both divorce and second marriage to a Christian separated from a hea- 
then partner by the agency of the latter, and many Protesiants have drawn 
from this an apostolic justification of divorce in case of malicious desertion, 
whether the guilty party be heathen or not. In his admirable work on 
Divorce and Divorce Legislation (G6, 71), President Woolsey has shown 
conclusively, as I think, on the one hand that Paul, like our Lord, started 
out, in his discussion, from the indissoluble nature of marriage, and admit- 
ted as the only exception that adultery which of itself caused the married 
pair no longer to be one flesh, and so violated the very idea of marriage. 
The only reason why Paul did not mention the exception is, as in the case of 
two of the evangelists, that he regarded the exception as a matter of course, 
and so passed it over in silence. 

Dr. Woolsey has shown, on the other hand, that in 1 Cor. 7 : 13, as in the 
whole passage of which this verse forms a part, the apostle, in case of wilful 
desertion of one partner by the other, permits separation but not remarriage. 
When he declares that in case the husband desert the wife, the latter "is 
not under bondage," he simply denies that the wife is bound at all hazards 
to continue living with the quarrelsome heathen husbaud. As in verse 10 
he had said of the wife compelled to depart from her husband, "If she 
depart, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband," so here, 
where the husband departs from the wife, the implication is that she is to 
remain unmarried also. Paul advances beyond Christ's position in only a 
single particular, namely, in conceiving of, and to a certain degree author- 
izing, separation without license of remarriage. The unwarrantable exten- 
sion of Paul's principle so as to include all cases of desertion — we are still 
giving the substance of Dr. Woolsey's remarks — has opened a wide door 
of divorce in Christian countries. 

Let all Christians understand" that what Paul permits in cases of deser- 



REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 439 

tion is simply separation a mensa et thoro, without a separation a vinculo 
matrimonii, — in other words, separation from bed and board, but not abso- 
lute divorce with the right of remarriage. "This third state, midway 
between full marriage union and divorce, has the sanction of the apostle 
Paul, and may be introduced into the law of Christian lands." Whatever 
legislation gives greater license than this, is false in principle, and opens the 
way for all manner of immorality. For I can only repeat the words of Christ 
— words whose reasonableness and truth are only made more clear by the 
pernicious results of recent experiments in law-making in the various States 
of the Union: "Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for forni- 
cation, and shall marry another, committeth adultery, and whoso marrietb 
her which is put away, committeth adultery." "And if a woman shall put 
away her husband and be married to another, she committeth adultery." 
(Mat. 19: 9; Mark 10: 12.) 

We come once more to the case which we set out to examine. What is 
the law of Christ with regard to the remarriage of persons who have been 
absolutely divorced, and divorced upon Scriptural grounds? We may 
answer at once, that the remarriage of the innocent party is permitted. Our 
Saviour's words imply this when he declares that, in every other case but 
this one of divorce for adultery, remarriage is unlawful. Such divorce just 
as completely frees the woman as does the husband's death, in which last 
case, as Paul tells us, she is free from the law of her husband, "so that she 
is no adulteress, though she be married to another man." (Rom. 7: 3). 

But may the guilty party marry again? We can only reply that Christ 
says nothing about the guilty party, and therefore our conclusions with 
regard to him must be mainly inferential and conjectural. We are not on 
this account, however, wholly without light upon the question. It was not 
so necessary that our Lord should treat of the rights of the guilty party to 
divorce, for the Mosaic law was there as the constant presupposition of his 
precepts — a law which he did not come to destroy, but to fulfill. According 
to that law, the guilty party to a divorce had no rights, unless it were the 
right to suffer death as the penalty of adultery. The case of the woman 
taken in adultery, even if we regard it as belonging to the sacred narrative, 
is no proof that Christ abrogated that penalty, for it was not solemn judicial 
process that he discountenanced, but the mob-violence of Pharisees, when he 
said, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her!" 
Nor does the fact that the power of life and death had been taken from the 
Jews by their Roman masters show that adultery was uniformly allowed to 
go unpunished. There were theocratic penalties, such as excommunication 
from the synagogue, which to a Jew had almost the bitterness of death. 

Is it possible to conceive that Jesus, with the Mosaic abhorrence of adul- 
tery and the remembrance of the Mosaic command that both parties to it 
should be stoned with stones till they died — is it possible to conceive, I 
say, that Jesus could have had it for his intent to let the adulterer go un- 
scathed, to repeat his crime, to corrupt others, and even to consummate 
a new marriage for the very sake of which his adultery may have been 
planned? The supposition seems incredible. If there be any crime against 
society upon which civil law needs to lay its hand, it would seem to be that 
crime which, in its very nature, tends to destroy the family, and turns the 



440 REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 

nursery of the child into a haunt of defilement and shame. And can there 
be any penalty for this great crime so obviously just, as to prohibit those 
who have been recreant to their trust from entering again upon a relation to 
which they have been so false? It seems, therefore, most untrue to say 
that Christ's silence is to be interpreted as granting permission to the guilty 
party to divorce to marry again. 

Here I am happy to have the strong support of President Woolsey's work 
on Divorce, to which I have already referred. I quote from him once more 
(page GO) : 

''It has been gravely argued in our country and our time that, inasmuch 
as the married pair are no longer one flesh after crime, the guilty one is 
free to marry again, yes. even to marry the tempter or seducer, and that this 
is no violation of the law of Christ. We admit that Christ observes silence 
on this point. He could not say that such a guilty author of a divorce com- 
mitted adultery by marrying again, for she is now free from her husband. 
But it would have been idle to refer to such a case, for in the first place it 
had nothing to do with the immediate point on which Christ expresses an 
opinion, and in the second place such a person would have been punishable by 
the Jewish law with death. To claim for an adulterer and an adulteress the 
protection of law in a Christian State, so that, when free through their 
crime from former obligations, they may legally perpetuate a union begun in 
sin, is truly to put a premium upon adultery. A Herod, on that plan, after 
sinning with his brother's wife, would need only to wait for legal separation 
to convert incest into legitimate wedlock." * 

It is by this time sufficiently plain that I consider the guilty party to a 
divorce, who marries again, at least during the life of the former partner, 
as virtually becoming a breaker of the law of Scripture as well as of the 
law of the State. Penitence, however, is possible, and good works may 
follow upon wrong-doing. Separation from the new partner, even after the 
State has declared the marriage null and void, may be, after years have 
passed, a greater wrong to the family than the continuance of the relation 
would be. After evidence of genuine contrition, the church may possibly 
receive such a person into its number, and may be benefited in many respects 
by his influence. 

But what shall we say. when one who has passed through this sad experi- 
ence feels himself called to the ministry, and asks for ordination? In the 
view of some, the same rule that would bar him from the ministry would 
bar him from the church. But we are persuaded that those who reason thus 
are in error. It is clear from the epistles of the New Testament, that there 
were special qualifications required in those who were to be teachers and 
leaders of the flock, which were not demanded of others. The man who is 
to stand before Christians as an example and an instructor must be "blame- 
less," by which we understand free, since his professed conversion, from 
any such moral delinquency as would generate suspicion with regard to the 
reality of his Christian character, and so would hinder his proper influence. 

There are able interpreters who would give the term " blameless "a wider 
comprehension still, making it include the life before, as well as after, con- 
version, and they point to the very striking fact, that in the New Testament 
there is no instance where the hands of Paul, or of the other apostles, were 



* In a private note to the author of this essay, received since the above 
was written, President Woolsey intimates that, since his book on Divorce 
was published, he has so far changed his view as to hold that no prohibition 
of such remarriage can fairly be drawn from Christ's own words, although 
be holds it to be contrary to good morals for either civil law or church law 
to permit remarriage in these cases. 



REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 441 

laid in ordination upon the bead of any man who had led an openly immoral 
life. I hesitate, however, to press an argument from the silence of Scrip- 
ture, and there may be doubt with regard to a rule which would have cost 
the church the ministerial service of an Augustine. But when a man's earlier 
sin shows its traces s'.ill in his present spirit and conduct, it is impossible to 
disconnect the two parts of his history in judging of his fitness for the 
ministry. In the case we are considering, this seems to be the fact. The 
evasion of New York law by marrying in another State, the doing of an act 
in Connecticut for the sake of escaping a punishment which would have 
been visited had the act been done in the place of his domicil, indicates a 
lingering of the same disregard for law which was manifest in the original 
adultery, and compels us to judge the last offense in the light of the former. 

And what we are compelled to do, the whole community in which such a 
man should do his ministerial work, would also be compelled to do. They 
have before them, as preacher of God's law, a man who has successfully 
defiled those "powers that be" which are "ordained of God." His example 
will speak louder than his precepts. It will nullify his preaching. And 
therefore he ought not to be a minister of the gospel. "Be ye clean, that 
bear the vessels of the Lord," was the demand of the priests of the Old 
Testament. "Having a good report of them that are without," is the 
demand of the ministers of the New. Such a man as we have supposed is 
not "blameless," and there is no place for him in the Christian ministry. 

In the excellent little treatise of Dr. Hovey, entitled The Scriptural Law 
of Divorce (pages 61-70), I find drawn out in full an argument which I had 
intended to present in detail, but which, with this reference, I must con- 
tent myself with simply mentioning. In the letters of the apostle Paul to 
Timothy and Titus, he enjoins that the bishop, presbyter, pastor, be "the 
husband of one wife," — that is, as nearly all agree, husband of no more than 
one wife. It is evident that the injunction takes for granted that there were 
in the church those who were husbands of more than one wife ; for if this 
were not so, this distinguishing requisition of pastors would be meaningless. 

Now it cannot be supposed for a moment that actual polygamists were 
included among the number of the members of Christ's church. The only 
reasonable inference is, that Paul alludes to the many converted from among 
the heathen, who, in their unregenerate days, yielding to the loose divorce 
practices of their time — practices which the Romans had apparently intro- 
duced into Palestine as well as into Greece — had married different wives at 
different times, divorcing one that they might take another, and so had 
come to have two or more persons still living to whom they had sustained 
the relation of husband. The danger arising from such facts as these, and 
the evidence these facts gave of an unstable and sensual mind, were a suffi- 
cient reason, in the judgment of the apostle, why such persons should not 
be entrusted with the responsibilities of government and leadership in the 
church of God. 

Do I need to apply these remarks, or to sum up what I have said? I 
consider that no person who has been a wilful contemner of the laws of the 
State in which he lives, and who is now enjoying the fruits of this contempt, 
is a proper candidate for ordination to the Christian ministry- I have grave 
doubts whether a confessed adulterer, who since his connection with the 



442 REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE. 

church has by stratagem escaped the legal penalty of his crime, is a proper 
person to be ordained by an ecclesiastical council. I deny that a man who 
knows of two living persons whom he has called his wife, can answer to 
Paul's requisitions of the Christian bishop. And it seems certain to me 
that no person of whom all these things are true can, by any gifts or graces, 
make up for the lack of that " blamelessness" and "good report" which 
the New Testament requires of its ministers. 

The matter which we have thus discussed is one of grave concern, when 
we remember how rife in our day is the theory that marriage is merely a 
civil contract, and that, like other civil contracts, it may be dissolved at the 
will of the parties to it. But marriage, like the State, is more than a civil 
contract, — it is an ordinance of God. Though entered into of free will, the 
relation, once formed, is clothed with divine sanctions and obligations, and 
is nothing less than the merging of the life of the one contracting party in 
the life of the other. The view that marriage is a partnership, to be dis- 
solved for slight causes, if not at will, is one which in practice would destroy 
the very foundation of civilized society. The civil-contract theory of mar- 
riage has in it the germ of far greater disaster than has the social-compact 
theory of government. Stringent divorce laws in protecting marriage pro- 
tect the State, for the purity of family life is the chief safeguard of social 
morality and of public justice. Contempt of these laws is a heinous offense 
against God and man. 

Marriage is not a sacrament, as the Romanist declares it to be, nor in case 
of adultery is it indissoluble. But it is indissoluble for every other cause ; 
and, when dissolved for this reason, it should be with penalties visited upon 
the offender such as will vindicate God's law and the law of the State. 
While we do not hold it a sacrament, we may hold it sacred. And this we 
are bound to do, as ministers, by solemnizing no marriages between persons 
unlawfully divorced ; as members of ordaining councils, by refusing to 
admit to the sacred office offenders against Christ's law and the civil statute; 
as members of churches, by subjecting to discipline those who violate the 
Scriptural rule of marriage and divorce ; as citizens, by holding up the 
teaching of Christ as the model of human legislation, and by influencing 
the makers of our laws to conform their work more perfectly to the divine 
standard. If there is anything of the Protestant spirit left in us, it is time 
for us to protest against the incoming flood of immorality which takes the 
guise of divorce law in so many of our States, and under the leadership of 
the Spirit to lift up a standard against it. 



XLIV. 
CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAi ECONOMY. 



On the first day of January, 1S27, Thomas Chalmers made this entry in 
Lis journal: — 'My chief earthly ambition is to finish a treatise on Political 
Economy as the commencement of a series of future publications on Moral 
Philosophy and Theology. Consecrate this ambition, and purge it of all sin 
and selfishness, O God!" And Dr. Chalmers closed his published work on 
"Political Ecouoiny, in connection with the Moral Aspects of Society" by 
earnestly recommending the lessons of this science to all who enter upon 
what he was pleased to call "'the ecclesiastical profession." In all this, 
however, he was only acting upon the hint furnished him by Adam Smith, 
father of the whole race of modern investigators in Social Science, for Adam 
Smith more than a hundred years ago, taught Political Economy from the 
chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. Such examples as these made it 
possible for Archbishop Whately to say that "no Theological Seminary 
should be without its Professorship of Political Economy," and for Dr. 
Bethune to call Political Economy ''that philosophic science which next to 
the gospel, whose legitimate offspring it is, will do more than anything else 
for the elevation and fraternization of our race." 

I mention these great names as a partial justification of the unusual theme 
which I discuss to-night, namely, the Relations between Christianity and 
Political Economy. If any doubts still exist as to the reality of these rela- 
tions, I am confident that a glance at the nature and province of Political 
Economy and Christianity respectively, will convince us of the intimate 
connection between the two. Political Economy is not, as some would have 
us believe, the science of mere material values or exchanges. No writer has 
ever yet been able to exclude from his account of it either moral influences 
or moral products. We cannot build it up unless we combine with the facts 
of outward nature other truths relating to human nature. No less broad a 
definition can embrace the matters discussed in the text books, than that 
propounded by Storch, the Russian economist, when he tells us that Polit- 
ical Economy is the science of the natural laws which determine the pros- 
perity of nations, including not only their wealth but their civilization. 

That there is such a science as this, we must maintain in spite of Mr. De 
Quincey's seeming denial. TVhen he asserted that in Political Economy 
"nothing can be postulated, nothing demonstrated, for anarchy even as to 
its earliest principles is predominant," he undoubtedly exaggerated the 
defective condition of economic knowledge in his day. John Stuart Mill, 
indeed, had not then published his great work, and the Reformers had not 



* A Lecture before the Pennsylvania Ministers' Institute, Chester, Pa., 
June, 1871. 

443 



444 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

yet sufficient strength to secure the repeal of the Corn Laws. But to say 
that Political Economy was not even then a science, is to forget Adam Smith, 
The analogy of history, of geology, of morals, should have taught De Quin- 
cey better. All these are sciences, although in each of them many a dispute 
is still unsettled. In each of them there is a body of principles arranged 
and classified. And it is true in our day, if not in De Quincey's, that there 
is a general settling down upon certain principles of Political Economy, as 
not only abstractly true but as practically verified. The great battles of the 
science have been fought out in England, and fought out for all time. 

The day has gone by, moreover, when it could be even plausibly main- 
tained that each country must have its own Political Economy, and that what 
is true in England is not true in America. Those who hold this opinion 
assuredly fail to magnify their office as economists, for such views reduce 
Political Economy from a science to an art. It cannot be thus reduced, 
because it has its foundations in the immutable laws of man's intellectual 
and social being. While humanity remains the same, the principles upon 
which man acts in securing his physical and social welfare will not change. 
These principles may be ignored and denied, but results will justify them. 
Since the laws of nature and the laws of mind are everywhere the same, 
there must be one Political Economy, as there is one Astronomy and one 
Moral Philosophy, for England and for India, for America and for Japan. 

The fundamental law of mind with which Political Economy has to deal 
is the law of self-interest. Finding this principle of action implanted in the 
human constitution and serving as the great motor in human intercourse, 
the science seeks to determine the methods and results of its operation, — in 
other words, the physical and social laws, which cooperate with it, and the 
effect upon the individual and upon society of hindering and counteracting 
its working on the one hand, or of allowing it the freest play and develop- 
ment on the other. 

With the morals of self-interest, Political Economy, it is true, does not 
concern itself. And yet no one can for a moment doubt that there is such 
a thing as the morals of self-interest. Moral Philosophy, as Dugald Stewart 
assures us, must recognize self-love not as an instinctive but as a rational 
principle, and must fix its place not simply among the desires but among 
the duties. For this reason, Political Economy is as intimately allied to 
Moral Philosophy as it is to purely physical science, and we can say with 
Dr. Wayland: "The principles of Political Economy are so closely analogous 
to those of Moral Philosophy, that almost every question of the one may be 
argued on grounds belonging to the other." 

And here we see how, in the very nature of the innermost principle of each, 
there is ground for suspecting a connection between Political Economy and 
Christianity. For, as the fundamental law of the former is self-interest, so 
that of the latter is universal benevolence. Love and self-love — are they 
necessarily antagonistic to each other? Because a man loves his neighbor, 
must he cease to love himself? Or, does he secure his own interest best, when 
he cherishes affection and practices benevolence toward all? These ques- 
tions at least suggest to us that there may be an important and interesting 
relation and cooperation between principles of our nature that at first sight 
seem so diverse in their tendencies. Instead of waning against each other, 



CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 4-±J 

they may be like the centrifugal and centripetal forces which result in the 
safe and harmonious movement of the earth in the line of progress marked 
out for it by God. 

But we may go further than this. Any true view of the nature of Chris- 
tianity leads us to suspect a relation between it and Political Economy far 
higher and more vital than that of reconciled antagonism. For there is such a 
thing as Christianity in the concrete, as well as Christianity in the abstract. 
Christianity is salvation for the body and for society, as well as salvation for 
the individual and for the soul. More and more it is perceived that Christian- 
ity, instead of contravening natural law, is in complete accord with natural 
law. In the highest and best sense, Christianity is the religion of nature — 
of nature true and perfect as it exists in the mind of God. As Theology 
becomes imbued with the realistic spirit of this new and better age, it traces 
more clearly the analogy between natural and moral law, applies more thor- 
oughly to Christian thought the idea of law which is the inspiration of 
modern science, represents Christianity more consistently as "the royal 
law" of which all Mosaic laws were the half-developed and half -compre- 
hended germ, and of which the physical and social laws of God's universe 
are but partial types and illustrations. With every stride of the world's 
thought, it is becoming more plain that religion and morality are essentially 
one; that faith and works are inseparable; and thafr a true Christianity 
involves the highest physical and social, as well as the highest mental and 
moral, well-being of man. 

I know of no better proof of the divine origin of Christianity than this, 
that her laws are little by little found to be laws of nature. And no consum- 
mation can be more important or fruitful in blessing than the determination 
of the place of the sciences in the conquering train of Christ. It is no small 
gain to religion and to human welfare, when any single department of knowl- 
edge confesses an humble relationship to Christianity and begins to serve its 
progress. This I believe to be already true of Political Economy. She has 
been more deeply indebted to Christianity, in the past, than she has some- 
times been willing to admit. Just as inventions like that of achromatic 
lenses, to which men seemed to be led by theoretical study alone, have been 
found to be anticipated in the wonderful natural adjustments and adaptations 
of the human eye, so philosophers and statesmen have not seldom been 
forced to accept broad and liberal theories of man's commercial and indus- 
trial relations, and after they have accepted them, have found to their sur- 
prise that these theories were essentially Christian theories, a legitimate 
outgrowth of principles which Christianity had inculcated long before. If 
Christianity has not furnished the germs of such theories, she has at least 
been the main agent in stimulating inquiry into the social welfare of man- 
kind — an inquiry almost unknown in ante-Christian times, — and has often 
furnished the moral power to carry out true theories, when selfishness has 
planted itself like a battery in the way. And Political Economy has par- 
tially repaid the debt, by furnishing concrete illustrations of Christ's laws, 
and by preparing the way for his triumphs. 

The need of determining the relations between these two great departments 
of human thought, and of adjusting them to each other, appears more clearly 
when we once consider the greivous results of even a partial and temporary 



446 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

war between them. We all know the harm that comes to thinking minds 
from the false impression that Social Science teaches the supreme and right- 
ful sway of other laws than those revealed in the gospel, — we all know how 
vast a multitude of the world's workers scout religion because it asserts a 
natural inequality of gifts and station, and for this reason put some wild 
theory of human rights in place of it. For the sake of men's souls then, as 
well as for the sake of their temporal welfare, we need to show them the folly 
of putting Christianity and Social Science in antagonism to each other, or of 
fancying that the truths of the one contradict the truths of the other. Min- 
eralogists tell us that there is a crystal called tourmaline, that has a peculiar 
powe£ of polarizing or twisting the rays of light that pass through it. Let 
a second crystal of tourmaline be added to the first in a transverse direction, 
and though each taken singly is transparent, every ray of light is stopped in 
the passage through the two, so that to use the words of a noted chemist, 
• ' the rays of the meridian sun cannot pass through a pair of crossed tour- 
malines" — the two crystals shut out the rays as perfectly as the closed slats 
of your window blinds shut out the sun. Turn the tourmalines in the same 
direction, and they are transparent to the light, — cross them, and not a ray 
of light can pass through them. I have sometimes fancied that Political 
Economy and Christianity were like these tourmalines. Either taken sepa- 
rately will give you Jche light of truth, God's light from heaven, — but when 
you have them both together, you must adjust them to each other, or they 
will refuse to transmit the light at all ; set them in antagonism to each other, 
and the very light that is in them becomes darkness. 

We have great reason to believe, then, that the relation between Christian- 
ity and the science we are considering is not so much a relation of reconciled 
antagonism, as it one of preestablished harmony and cooperation. Both 
are parts of one great system. We shall see this more clearly if we look at 
certain elements in each which, if not identical with, are at least strikingly 
analogous to, corresponding elements of the other. First, there is a human 
element in Political Economy as well as in Christianity, — the supremo rank of 
manhood is recognized in the one as well as in the other. Political Economy 
teaches that the chief agent in production, and the chief author of wealth, 
is human labor. Mere natural gifts do not constitute wealth, — they furnish 
utilities but not values. Air and sunshine, though very useful, will bring 
no price, because they are God's free gifts, and gifts to all alike. There are 
certain anomalous cases of value, which at first sight seem difficult to bring 
under this principle, but they are only apparent exceptions to the rule. The 
diamond, which I find by accident upon the sea shore, has as great value as 
if I had obtained it with infinite toil by searching the river beds of Brazil. 
The value certainly does not lie in the material itself. — this never costs, but 
whenever it is given, is always freely given by God, — but the value does 
just as certainly, though only partially, originate in the labor which went to 
the picking up and appropriation of the stone. Left there upon the shore, 
unseen and unappropriated, the diamond would be as worthless as any com- 
mon pebble. 

There is indeed another element in value, soon to be mentioned, besfOea 
this of human labor. Yet still there is substantial truth in Hobbcs's maxim, 
that 'plenty depeudeth, next to God's favor, on the labor and industry of 



CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 447 

man." And the truth was never more clearly stated than in the first great 
textbook of political economy: "Labor was the first price, the original 
purchase-money, that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by sil- 
ver, but by labor, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased." 
Labor gives worth to all things we possess. Labor is the alchemist that 
turns the barren sand to gold. Labor not only originates, but it from year 
to year reproduces, the wealth of a country. Capital is being forever con- 
sumed, and as it is consumed it must be renewed by labor. The old com- 
putations of physiology made out that the particles of matter In our bodies 
changed once in seven years, so that not an ounce of our weight was the 
same that it was seven years before. Modern investigations have greatly 
shortened the period, but it furnishes still an apt illustration of the way in 
which labor is perpetually renewing the wealth of the land. The whole cap- 
ital of this country is only seven times as great as its annual production 
Sweep away all the wealth of the nation, — a few years' labor would produce 
as much again. From this fact Mr. Mill explains the surprising rapidity 
with which countries devastated by war recover themselves. The war only 
consumes, a little earlier, what would have been consumed sooner or later at 
any rate ; a few years of increased exertion make it all up again. 

So we see the necessity and dignity of labor. Political Economy is far 
from being the materialistic science of which it has often been accused. It 
declares that wealth consists, not in material products, but in the manly 
energy that has been expended upon them. It assures us that the strength of 
a nation is not in its treasures of gold and silver, its fertile soil, its capacious 
harbors, its overflowing granaries, its splendid edifices, its parks for pleas- 
ure, but in the honest toil, the intelligent industry, the mental capacity, the 
moral energy of its sons. 

" What constitutes a state? 

Not high raised battlement or labored mound, 
Thick wall or moated gate ; 

Not cities proud, with spires and turrets crowned ; 
Not bays and armed ports, 

Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride ; 
Not starred and spangled courts, 

Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride; 
No, men — high-minded men — 
********* 

Men who their duties know, 

But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain." 

Sir William Jones was right. Political Economy joins hands with Chris- 
tianity in making man king of this lower world. When it declares that no 
earthly thing has value, except it bear man's seal and superscription upon it, 
it proclaims the self-same truth that Christianity had uttered from the first, 
— namely, the dignity of manhood, and the essential grandeur of all faithful 
human work. 

Let us appreciate, before we go further, the significance and worth of this 
united testimony. Let us remember that this truth, so familiar to us and so 
vital to human welfare, is by no means a universal or intuitive idea. Men 
have not always believed it. The greatest masters of ancient thought, Plato 
and Aristotle, denied it. Aristotle asserted that a mechanical employment 
was ignoble and destructive to virtue, while Plato excluded husbandmen and 



448 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

artizans from all share in his ideal government. Even Cicero said that all 
artizans were engaged in a degrading profession, and that there could he 
nothing ingenuous in a workshop. But now Social Science accepts the teach- 
ing of Christianity that lahor is not merely the appointed lot of man, but 
that it is the chief source of human wealth ; that the highest end of human- 
ity is not mere production, but rather the development of manhood ; that 
man in other words is the centre and glory of the world ; that persons are 
greater than things ; that humanity is worthy of universal honor. We may 
use natural agents, air, water, fire, soil; but we may never use man, — treat 
him as a brute thing, forget the dignity of his being or the nobility of his labor. 
The Scripture only anticipates the voice of Science, when it declares : — 

" Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, 
And hast crowned him with giory and honor. 
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; 
Thou hast put all things under his feet." 

Secondly, there is a social element in Political Economy, as well as in 
Christianity. While both recognize the importance of human labor and the 
dignity of the human person, they also recognize the mutual needs and 
dependence of men. Every man has a multitude of desires, but he has the 
power to satisfy very few of these desires by his own labor. How many of 
the articles you consume do you actually produce yourself? Exceedingly 
few. You may make one or two things well, but you cannot make all things 
well. Humanity would go back to the savage state, if it were not for divi- 
sion of labor, and exchange of products one for another. Thus we come at 
once to the provision in the very constitution of man for his social existence, 
and civilization might be defined as an organized recognition of this mutual 
dependence. From this dependence arises one of the most important ideas of 
Political Economy — an idea first clearly announced by Bastiat, the French 
Economist — namely, the idea of service. This supplements the idea of labor 
which we have just been considering, and, together with that, makes up the 
full and correct notion of value. Value has its source not in labor alone, 
but in labor so applied and directed that it constitutes a service to somebody 
else. Service in this way becomes the real measure of value. Things are 
valuable, according as they are capable of ministering to other's good. 

See then the network, in one sense simple, yet in another infinitely intri- 
cate and ingenious, which binds me, whether I will or no, to my neighbor, and 
makes it necessary that I should maintain relations with him, and in some 
way serve him. My isolated and selfish notions of value are of very little 
importance ; it takes two to make a bargain ; I must consult my neighbor's 
opinion as well as my own. I may own a gold mine in the middle of Africa, 
or a whole square league of ground on Hudson's Bay, and be none the richer 
for it. I may labor all my days, but so long as all my efforts are spent upon 
myself, I have accomplished nothing toward the production of value. Polit- 
ical Economy rates me only as an unproductive consumer of God's bounty, 
until I leave my selfishness and isolation, and begin by the work of my brain 
or of my hands to serve my fellow-men. 

We have seen that labor is not dishonorable, — let us learn the equally 
important lesson that service is no more so. Whether we call it by that name 
or not, every man who prospers in any honest trade or orofession does so by 



CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 440 

virtue of the service he renders others. To wash clothes or to black boots 
for a livelihood, provided it be only a willing and hearty service, is a calling 
as respectable as that of the lawyer or the preacher. It is the very dignity 
of the preacher that he is a "minister," or as the word implies, a servant. 
And a just Political Economy only echoes the maxims of Christianity :— 
"He that will be chief among you let him be your minister;" "no man 
liveth unto himself;" "by love serve one another." And this not simply 
by farthering their temporal good. It is the greatest of mistakes to suppose 
that Social Science recognizes no values but those which are material. In Dr. 
Hanna's biography of his great father-in-law, we have an amusing instance 
of the reductio ad aosurdum applied to such a theory as this. "Most of 
Dr. Chalmers' students." runs the biography, "will recall his triumphant 
overthrow of Adam Smith's unfortunate distinction between productive and 
unproductive labor, in which the statesman, the judge, the lawyer, the 
teacher, the clergyman and the man of science, are all classed among the 
non-producers, the nati consumere fruges, because they do not create any 
tangible commodity : while the pastry-cook, the squib-manufacturer, and 
the vender of quack medicines are exalted to the rank of productive laborers 
because they create tangible commodities." But Dr. Chalmers might have 
made his point clearer, if he had more fully apprehended the nature of value 
as consisting essentially in service. Then he might have seen that Political 
Economy not only recognizes other commodities than those which are merely 
material, but that it directly tends to elevate all labor by the supreme value 
it puts upon the mental and moral qualities which enter into it. The same 
exertion of nerve and muscle that carries the savage in his foot-race may 
carry the physician on his errand of mercy. The same voice that sings the 
ribald song may come to preach the everlasting gospel. Thus by turning 
labor into service, and by estimating its value according to the higher ele- 
ments which go to the making of it, Political Economy unites with Chris- 
tianity in teaching that an isolated, selfish life is worthless, but that the 
service of mankind is the end for which we are to live. 

But a third principle comes into view here, and completes the circle. The 
personal and social elements in both Political Economy and Christianity 
harmonize with each other. The service of others is perfectly compatible 
with our own best and highest interest. Every one knows the lamentable 
consequences of the old Mercantile Theory, which in effect said to individuals 
and classes and nations: "Get money — honestly if you can, — but get 
money." It made the great end of life to sell — and to sell for coin, — as if 
coin were of value except for what it would buy. It went deliberately upon 
the principle that, in every bargain, one party must always get the better of 
the other ; that for every gain there must be somewhere a corresponding 
loss. And so there was, under the forms of peace, a real war between indi- 
viduals, and between classes, and between nations. Each felt that the rest 
were crowding him, and that he could secure his own interest only by crowd- 
ing them. Governments interfered to prevent injustice, but, by imposing 
burdens upon trade and commerce, only added to the injustice they sought 
to remove. There cannot be found a more striking instance of the practical 
disorganization and misery that may result from a false theory of human 
relations. But, although we still see relics of this ancient absurdity in pop- 
29 



450 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

ular theories of class-legislation and of foreign trade, we congratulate our- 
selves that the hideous spectre appears very little of late in scientific litera- 
ture. The whole doctrine of Exchange, the central doctrine of Political Econ- 
omy, Is based upon the idea that every bargain may be, and should be, of 
mutual advantage to both parties. And since men form a clearer idea of their 
own interest than any other man or body of men can form for them, the State 
can better serve them and serve itself by leaving each to follow his own bent, 
make his own bargains, engage in his own trade, whatever these may be. 
In other words, the prosperity of the public is identical with the prosperity 
of individuals, and the prosperity of one class of the community identical 
with the prosperity of every other. 

I cannot raise my own wheat or grind my own flour. It is an advantage 
to me to pay the flour -dealer for my flour, even though I give a price suffi- 
cient to compensate him for his time and skill in selection , besides remuner- 
ating the farmer who raised the wheat, the miller who ground it, and the 
transportation company who brought it to market. All these make their 
profit, but that does not prevent me from making my profit from the bargain 
also. And no trade or business in which this principle of mutual advantage 
does not apply is any more expedient in economics, than it is legitimate in 
morals. To sell adulterated liquors is an injury to public wealth as well as 
to public virtue, because no real service is rendered for the money received. 
To grind the faces of the poor, by extortion and usury, injures trade every- 
where by violating the law of reciprocal benefit which lies at the basis of it. 
A spirit of grasping selfishness is destructive of my own permanent interest. 
It is for my interest to encourage others to bring me the best of their pro- 
ducts, and to do this with regularity and constancy. They cannot do this 
without fair remuneration. So that I must not only live, but let live. I 
must act on the principle that what harms others really does indirectly harm 
me. And what is this, but the Scripture exhortation: -'Look not every man 
upon his own things but also upon the things of others." Political Economy. 
as well as Christianity, commands us not to drive too sharp bargains ; not to 
depreciate another's work ; not to think that any one class can monopolize 
the profits of trade, without indirectly harming itself thereby. Since many 
sorts of men, many classes of producers, must live together, it is for their 
interest not to live in conflict, but to remember that their interest and others' 
good are inseparable. Love works no ill to my neighbor, — neither does it 
work ill to me. In the last analysis, self-love and Christian love teach the 
same lesson. There is a benevolence inherent in all just Economy. It is 
the sworn and constant foe to all slavery, to all monopoly, to all prejudices 
and hatreds, whether of class or race. Social Science as well as Christianity 
urges me to give labor its freedom, its honor, its reward. When I "render 
unto all their dues," and "'love my neighbor as myself." I only secure my 
own interest, for the good of each is bound up in the good of all. 

Thus it is that Christianity and Political Economy not only recognize and 
justify the fundamental principles of each other, but confess that the prin- 
ciples of the one are essentially the same with those of the other, the differ- 
ence between them resulting mainly from the different points of view from 
which each regards the facts common to both, and from the different spheres 
In which religion and science move. On the one hand, Christianity concedes 



CllKLSl'IAMTl' AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 451 

a place and a large place to self-love, — this indeed is made the measure of 
the love due to our neighbor, un the other hand. Political Economy allows 
that the truest self love is impossible without benevolent regard for the 
interests and rights of others. And so, with a little change of phrase, we can 
repeat the words of a noted writer on Social Science: "The rules of Chris- 
tian morality are so far coincident with those of utility that, long periods 
and entire communities being contemplated, their precepts are the same." 

The value of such a conclusion as this can hardly be overestimated. Let 
me illustrate it. Many of you are aware that there once were many, and still 
are a few, who deny the vegetable nature and origin of coal. The solid and 
brittle blocks we put upon our Sres certainly look far more like mineral thau 
like woody matter. Theoretically convinced as I had always been that these 
blocks were the relics of ancient forests, I had often longed for some ocular 
demonstration of the fact. So I made myself familiar with the look of dif- 
ferent woods under the microscope, and especially with that of the coniferous 
woods, of which the coal was said to be composed. A simple pine-shavini,' 
presented a beautiful and striking spectacle. There were the multitude of 
elongated cells stretching often across the whole field of view,— each cell 
with those characteristic internal markings which to a practiced eye reveal 
the nature of the wood, as plainly as the leaf and bark and contour of the 
stately pine reveal the nature of the tree to the lumberman in the forest. 
Upon the side of each cell, though so minute as to be utterly invisible to 
the naked eye, were delicate rows of sculptured circles, each with its central 
dot, as if some fairy had been working at it with tiny compasses. And then 
across these tubular cells, piled one upon another, were seen at intervals 
certain darker groups of perpendicular bars, arranged like short horizontal 
ladders. These were the medullary rays, which serve perhaps with their 
infinitesimal fibres to bind the cells together. Such was the appearance of 
the pine-wood shaving. But this was not enough. . I obtained also a section 
of cannel coal. It had been fastened securely to a strip of glass, and then 
ground down so thin as to be nearly transparent. I put this under the 
microscope too, — and lo ! there were the same elongated cells, piled one upon 
another, — there were the evident traces of circular markings upon their sides, 
— there were the ladder-like groups of medullary rays, — and all as unmistak- 
able as they had been in the little pine-shaving I had seen before. If I had 
had doubts before, I could doubt no longer ; the pines of to-day had their 
representatives ages upon ages ago. Unlike as they seemed at first, the coal 
and the wood were essentially one. So there is a minute scrutiny of the 
facts of Social Science that finds therein the proofs of its essential oneness 
with Christian truth. The hard, dark, dead mass of economic laws assumes 
new beauty and significance when we see in them representatives of the same 
life that inspires the gospel, and find that the truths of the one corroborate 
and illustrate the truths of the other. 

It would be matter of great interest to apply the principles I have 
enunciated to one after another of the practical relations discussed in social 
economics, and to verify them in each. Time, however, and the patience 
of my auditors, will prevent our glancing at more than a single one. Let 
us look for a few moments at the relation between capital and labor. I 
draw your attention to this, because the questions at issue here are among 



452 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

the most important and pressing with which the nation and the church have 
at present to do. There can be no doubt that the thought of the world has 
been turning of late from political to social questions, and that the greatest 
secular movement of modern society is that which seeks to rescue the work- 
man from the grasp and control of capital. With the rising intelligence of 
the laboring classes, there is a rising fear of the ultimate effects upon them 
of the enormous aggregations of wealth which modern division of labor and 
costly machinery seem to require in all sorts of production. The danger 
which seems imminent to many thoughtful minds among them, is the danger 
that capital may soon secure such a monopoly of production, that all possi- 
bility of competition will cease, and that with this will be wrested from the 
real workers of the world all hope of rising above the rank in which they 
were born. To be a proletarian class, dependent for their very breath upon 
the favor of capitalists, and bitterly conscious that their masters may com- 
bine to crush out of them all independence and all hope, — this is the picture 
which they draw to themselves of the not improbable future, provided they 
do not bestir themselves to secure their rights. And we cannot wonder that 
they love quite as little the tyranny of gigantic corporations, as they do the 
tyranny of feudal lords from which they have just escaped. France cares 
more to-day about a reorganization of society with reference to the labor- 
question, than she does about monarchy or democracy. The Communists 
of Paris, abolishing rents as they did, and demanding the use of capital 
without interest, were strong because they represented the popular senti- 
ment of the metropolis with regard to the so-called rights of labor. And 
their English sympathizers in Hyde Park, only awhile ago, showed their 
view of the relation between capital and labor, by the declaration of one of 
their speakers that the accumulation of property was robbery, and that 
those who accumulated it were not only thieves but murderers. 

Not all laborers, thanks to the intelligence and freedom of America, are 
in such gross darkness as prevails in some parts of Europe. Yet there are 
frequent indications of radically wrong thinking upon this subject, even on 
this side of the Atlantic — wrong thinking which, if not replaced by a better 
sentiment may, sooner than we suppose, breed public trouble. It is of vast 
importance to our future peace, that pulpit and press alike should inculate 
sound doctrine with regard to the relations of Capital and Labor. Let the 
voice of Christianity, as well as the voice of Economic Science, be heard, 
vindicating the principles which we have seen to belong to both. Let 
them declare the mutual dependence and common interest of employer and 
employed. On the one hand, let them demand for the laborer a fair share 
in the products of his toil. The journeyman-mechanic's work is just as 
important in its place as that of the capitalist who employs him. Capital 
is dependent upon labor, and should recognize this dependence. But then, 
on the other hand, let them demand for the capitalist, his fair share also. 
Labor may exaggerate its claims. It may become as arbitrary and irre- 
sponsible a tyrant as capital ever was. It may make out that it is the only 
agent in production, and demand all the fruits, thus violating the rule of 
Scripture and of Political Economy alike. It is of as much importance that 
the workman should understand the nature and rights of capital, as that the 
capitalist should understand the nature and rights of labor. 



CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 453 

Lubor and capital, — they go together ; both are essential, and equally 
essential, to production. As well dispute which blade of a pair of scissors 
has mosi; to do with the cutting, as to dispute whether labor has most to do 
with production, and deserves the greatest reward, or whether capital does 
most and deserves most. Future production would be impossible, were it 
not for the capital that in the meantime supports labor. Capital is nothing 
but the accumulations of the past, applied as a fund for new production. 
Hence it is the very store from which the laborer draws his life. Capital 
does not lie idle, — the moment it lies idle it really ceases to be capital, — ■ 
but is all consumed in employing and sustaining labor for the harvests of 
the future. Even the capitalist who docs no work himself gets interest for 
the use of his money. How could ho get interest for it, if his money were 
not put to use — were not doing useful work in the hands of somebody — 
were not providing wages for laborers whom the capitalist never saw? Thus 
capital is the limit of industry ; when capital gives out, industry must starve. 
Hence, nothing is so much to be desired by the laborer as that capital 
should be abundant, and that its possession should be safe, — for in this case 
competition among capitalists will be most active, and the wages of labor 
will reach their highest point. 

And does not the capital, which performs all this service, merit quite 
as much of compensation as the labor which it has employed? How has 
this capital been accumulated? Only as the result of long abstinence and 
saving. The owner might have spent it upon himself, his houses, his 
grounds, his pleasures. But he chooses, instead, to abstain from this per- 
sonal expenditure, and to devote his gains to the support of labor. And 
the proceeds of that labor he takes again, and with them supports new labor, 
so giving employment, and it may be, happiness, to hundreds. Does not 
this abstinence on his part deserve to be rewarded? Will men continue- 
thus to abstain, unless their abstinence meets with some reward? And then 
the risks of production, the chances of falling markets, and of losses from 
unsold goods, the accidents of fire and flood, of thieves and insolvent 
debtors, of unsuccessful ventures and ultimate failure, — who will encounter 
these without the prospect of a corresponding reward? And lastly, the 
skill and foresight, the knowledge of markets, the business-training of years, 
— is all this to pass for naught? All this goes to making up the value of 
the product, quite as much as the manual labor of the workman, — and on 
every principle of justice, as well as of economics, it deserves its fair share 
of the profit and reward. 

This slight consideration of the nature of capital is at least sufficient to 
show us the folly of the measure for which socialists often clamor so loudly, 
and which they conceive to be a permanent remedy for the evils of poverty, 
and for all inequalities of condition among mankind. I mean a compulsory 
division of capital among all classes of society, and the prevention by law 
of any but an exceedingly limited accumulation. Aside from the impracti- 
cability of the scheme, even at the outset, and the disastrous effects upon 
society of withdrawing the strongest motives to industry, think for a moment 
if its effects upon the condition of those who received its original benefits. 
Remember that capital is a fund preserved from the inroads of personal 
expenditure. In order to produce anything, it must be constantly consunn d 



454 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

in paying wages. Like a river, it remains the same only by flowing on and 
changing its place every moment. Divide up this fund among the poor, 
so that it is consumed upon personal expenses, — and it is lost. Suppose I 
should go to my city-market on market-day, and seeing the bountiful supply 
of meats and vegetables there, should fancy that I had discovered a means 
of banishing hunger from the town, and with this view should buy up the 
whole supply and order an equal distribution to every family of the papu- 
lation. The quantity seems very great, — but how long will it last? Have 
I done away with hunger forever? Why, no! by the time next market-day 
came round, everybody would be just as hungry as before. So the capital 
of a country is no permanent thing, but a fund that must be continually 
renewed by labor. To make a forced distribution of it among all classes, 
would be simply to waste the whole, to reduce all to the same level of pov- 
erty and starvation, and to deprive them of the very motives and means 
which they would need to raise them above their misery. 

A proper conception of the nature of capital enables us also to see how 
misguided, and blind to their own interest, are those who look upon capital 
as the natural enemy of labor. How often do workmen regard their labor 
as an unjust exaction, either in its kind or in its extent, and with that view 
set themselves deliberately to do just as little as may be for the money they 
receive. I fear that the idea of mutual advantage in a bargain, the idea of 
just and hearty service, the idea of wages honestly and fairly earned, is 
fading out of the minds of the workmen of this generation. And then comes 
in the notion that somehow, by artificial arrangements, by combination or by 
legislation, more money can be got for less work, labor of poor quality can 
be made to get as much pay as labor of good quality, and force or threats 
can be made to accomplish what reason and the freedom of the market can- 
not accomplish. It is not combination to which we should object, — the laws 
of demand and supply do not execute themselves ; higher prices will never be 
got unless demanded; — but what is objectionable is the hampering of the 
laborer's freedom; the subjection of his will to the irresponsible and despotic 
authority of trades-unions and committees ; the closing up of the avenues of 
labor to all but members of a guild ; in other words, the bringing back of 
the restrictions upon labor which have so hindered human development in 
centuries past. Free competition is the life of trade, — and the workman, 
in his effort to get unjust advantage over the employer, only illustrates the 
common doctrine of Christianity and of Political Economy that overweening 
selfishness is fatal to the interest and welfare of him who indulges it. 

It is interesting and hopeful to see that the members of the trades-unions 
in England are beginning to appreciate the great injustice and suicidal char- 
acter of forced strikes for higher wages, and are taking measures to avoid 
them. It argues a more intelligent apprehension of the relations between 
labor and capital, that a recent Conference in London representing no less 
than 700,000 men, members of the various trades-unions all over the country, 
solemnly resolved that, for the future, recourse should in no place or circum- 
stances be made to a strike, but that all disputes should be referred, as they 
arose, to joint delegations of employers and employed, presided over by an 
umpire. And the partial solution, by means of arbitration, of disputes 
between the miners of Pennsylvania and the companies that employ them, 



CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 45 J 

is a mark of progress which we may trust will not he without its lessons to 
all departments of trade throughout our own laud. For labor to impose 
arbitrary exactions upon capital, with the hope that an}- permanent benefit 
can be derived therefrom, is only to repeat the fallacy which ^Esop ridiculed 
so long ago, when he told abv,aL the hands and feet, the eyes and mouth, 
declaring that they would no longer serve the stomach or furnish it with its 
supplies. They forgot that the stomach supplied them with strength and 
sinew, quite as much as they supplied it with food ; and they saw their mis- 
take when the hands and feet could move no longer, and the eyes and mouth 
had closed in death. 

While labor has its duties, however, it is no less certain that capital has 
its duties also. As it is for the interest of labor to have an eye to the rights 
of capital, so it is for the interest of capital to have an eye to the rights of 
labor. I think it cannot be doubted that as labor becomes more intelligent, 
it will claim and justly claim a somewhat larger share of profits than has 
been hitherto awarded it. It will justly claim more, because it will be worth 
more. There is a powerful tendency in this country to independence among 
the working classes. With greater knowledge of the business they are doing, 
they have a stronger feeling of ownership in a part of its products. There 
was a time when employers could hide the amount of their profits, — could, 
by combination among themselves, keep down the price of labor while they 
themselves were getting rich. But that day is passing by. The condition 
of the various trades and manufactures is becoming a public matter, ami 
employers will be obliged, either to give their employees something equiva- 
lent to an interest in the business, or to see them set up cooperative estab- 
lishments for themselves. We may safely say that the working men of this 
country are less and less inclined to work for mere wages, — they will yet 
demand with their whole soul that they may have an interest in the thinga 
they make. This doctrine will lead to the formation of cooperative estab- 
lishments in continually greater number and on a continually greater scale. 
The beginnings that have been made in this direction, with their weakness 
and frequent failure, ought not to blind us to the real value of the principle 
nor to the possibility of its successful operation. Paris has now several 
hundred such manufactories, many of which are leading houses in their 
respective trades. England can point to Brigg's Colliery and to the Cross- 
ley Carpet Manufactory as notable examples of success in the same line — ■ 
examples where the accumulated capital has reached hundreds of thousands 
of pounds. Cooperation has one great element of success — the personal 
interest of every man in his work, — but it also has one element of weakness 
— the diflQculty of securing competent management by the payment of mere 
salary. A man after all manages his own business best, and is best trained 
for his own business by that very management. If employers can combine, 
with this great advantage of personal supervision, the other advantage of 
giving each workman some direct interest in the profits of the concern, the 
double benefit would, in all probability, outweigh any incidental evils or 
difficulties arising from the union of the two, and do much to solve the prob- 
lem of capital and labor. And examples of such management are not want- 
ing. Leclaire, a house painter of Paris, as Mr. Mill informs us, employs two 
hundred workmen. These 'he pays in the usual manner by fixed wages or 



45G CIIKISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

salaries. He assigns to himself, besides interest on the capital invested, a 
fixed allowance for his labor and responsibility as manager. At the end of 
the year the surplus profits are divided among all, himself included, in the 
proportion of their salaries. He has not only done for years a large business 
and acquired a handsome competence, but has found his account in the 
admirable activity and zeal of his workmen, and in the kindly relations that 
have subsisted between himself and them. Dupont, a printer of Paris, 
employing three hundred men, has found the distribution among them of 
even a tenth part of the profits, though this does not amount in a year to 
more than a fortnight's extra wages, to be a means of stimulating industry 
and of improving the products of his office to a degree which far more than 
repays the outlay. 

All that is intended in these remarks, however, is to draw attention to the 
tendencies of the day and to the illustration which they furnish of the great 
truth of social and moral science, that all classes of society, even those which 
commonly look most suspiciously upon each other, have a common interest 
and are bound to work harmoniously together. In the full recognition of 
this truth we see the greatest hope of labor. The increase of capital ought 
not to be matter of apprehension to the laborer since, with every increase, 
there must be greater competition among capitalists, and a consequent 
advance in the workman's share of profits in every branch of trade. In this 
fact of Political Economy, that capital increases faster than population, lies 
a prophecy of the gradual advance of the laboring classes in comfort and 
intelligence, since this secures for them the certainty of a constant increase 
of wages. And, as for the great evils expected to result from the combina- 
tion of capitalists and the restriction of manufactures to vast establishments, 
we may set over against these, the principle of association, which enables 
workmen also to combine, not to secure by threats or violence what does not 
belong to them by right, but to unite the little fragments of capital which 
each possesses, until they form a fund large enough for successful competi- 
tion with the capitalists themselves. The only remedy for the evils of 
cooperation is cooperation — cooperation either of capitalists with laborers, 
so that the one shares to some fair degree the profits of the other, or cooper- 
ation of laborers with one another, so that they virtually become capitalists 
themselves, working for their own interest most effectually when they work 
for the body to which they belong. 

The realization of this hope, upon any large or general scale, may seem to 
many to be impracticable, or at least very far away. Many will insist that 
neither the laws of Political Economy, nor of Christianity, will ever really 
regulate the action of mankind. Selfishness rules the day, they will say : 
and, the more grasping and unprincipled it is, the greater will be its success. 
They will point to merchant princes whose wealth has been coined out of 
the hearts and brains of ten thousand toilers — toilers whom they have 
remorselessly trampled under foot. But these are the exceptions, not the 
rule, and the real lesson they teach is a far different one from this. For one 
who has reached a competency by iniquity, a hundred have failed, — and 
the noblest successes have been successes of another sort. A Brassey in 
England, and a Krupp in Germany, have shown that whole armies of work- 
men may be managed, not as machines, but as sentient and moral agents, 



CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 457 

with the highest advantage to the governing power that directs them. In 
the general, and in the long run, honesty and kindness are the best policy. 
God has not disjoined the physical from the moral laws of his universe, nor 
made it best that men, even so far as worldly prospects are concerned, 
should play the villain. The highest prosperity, whether for the individual 
or society is, in spite of temporary and insignificant exceptions, conditioned 
upon obedience to God's laws. And it does good to proclaim these laws. 
It will benefit the working-classes to know that their true interest lies in 
their own hands — in frugality, intelligence, union with others. Only as 
they save the proceeds of their labor, and associate themselves with their 
fellows, will they lift themselves up to comfort and independence. It will 
benefit the holders of capital to know that they owe a duty to workmen 
beyond that of mere payment of wages, — namely, the duty of doing what 
they can to elevate the general character of those whom they employ, — 
and that this duty is identical with their own ultimate and highest interest. 
There may be difficulties in the way of applying just principles, — but if 
capitalists and workmen can be only educated into a right disposition, we 
may be sure that, where there is a will, there is also a way. 

I have confidence that Frovidence is turning the thoughts of both the 
scientific and religious world to these questions, in order that the relations 
between capital and labor may be settled upon a just and enduring basis. 
There may be temporary strife and chaos of opinions, but out of all this 
light will come. Nothing is so much to be deprecated as the haste and 
passion and ignorance on the one hand, or the short-sighted avarice on the 
other, which would precipitate conflict between these two great factors of 
production. Nothing is more to be desired than such a thorough inculca- 
tion of correct principles, and such a growth in mutual respect for each 
other's rights, that war between them will be impossible. Neither the 
demands of Political Economy, nor of Christianity, will be satisfied until 
both perceive that their interests are one, begin to seek each other's good, 
and bring in benevolence as an element in all their relations. Then will be 
brought about the glorious deliverance and crowning of labor, to which so 
many noble hearts have looked forward, and for which so many have vainly 
sighed. Who can refuse to add his prayer for that consummation, when he 
reads the sorrowful but inspiring song of that poet of labor, Gerald Massey : 

" High hopes, that burned like stars sublime, 

Go down in the heavens of freedom ; 
And true hearts perish in the time 

We bitterliest need them ; 
But never sit we down and say, 

There's nothing left but sorrow ; 
We walk the wilderness to-day 

The promised land to-morrow. 

'* Through all the long dark night of years, 

The people's cry ascendeth : 
And earth is wet with blood and tears,— 

But our meek sufferance endeth ; 
The few shall not forever sway, 

The many moil in sorrow : 
The powers of hell are strong to-day 

But Christ shall rise to-morrow. 









458 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

" Build up heroic lives, and all 

Be like a sheathen sabre, 
Eeady to flash out at God's call, 

O chivalry of labor ! 
Triumph and toil are twins, and aye 

Joy suns the cloud of sorrow, 
And 't is the martyrdom to-day, 

Brings victory to-morrow." 

The same principles might be applied, as I .have intimated, and In an 
extended discussion should be applied, to other relations than those between 
Capital and Labor. There, for example, Is the relation between luxurious 
consumption and the productive industry of a country, between the desire 
for unlimited accumulation and the educational or aesthetic needs of society, 
between the great corporations which threaten to control our legislation and 
the public whose franchise they have obtained, between the security of the 
national creditor and the financial prosperity of the land, between the free- 
dom of commerce from all needless restrictions of impost or tax and the 
merging of all race-hatreds in a universal human brotherhood. The mere 
mention of these various relations suggests the vastness of the field over 
which Political Economy and Christianity hold joint jurisdiction, and the 
greatness of the service which the one may render to the other. Political 
Economy has limits beyond which it cannot go. Upon those boundaries it 
stands and calls for Christianity to be its helper. I find, in Mr. Walker's 
"Science of Wealth," a quotation from Bastiat, which plainly shows this 
with regard to the single matter of value. "In order," he says, "that a 
service should possess value, in the economical sense of the word, it is not 
at all indispensable that it should be real, conscientious and useful service. 
It is sufficient that it is accepted and paid for by another service. It 
depends wholly on the judgment we form in each case; and this is the 
reason why morals will always be the best auxiliary of Political Economy. 
Economic Science would be impossible if we admitted as values only values 
correctly and judiciously appreciated." It is at just this point, indicated 
by the French economist, that Christianity comes in to rectify our ideas of 
value. It sets up its spiritual standards over against the materialism which 
would make earthly wealth the supreme and only good. Political Economy, 
left to itself, can never reach the ends which it proposes. Man's highest 
self-interest is often in conflict with a lower self-interest, which contradicts 
the first, and the lower obscures the higher, — the speck upon the window- 
pane is larger to the sight than the house upon the distant mountain-side. 
What can correct the errors of a narrow self-interest, that looks only to the 
near and the present, but that faith which is "the substance of things hoped 
for, the evidence of things not seen," and the love whose arms take into 
their broad embrace the whole universe of things, and the whole eternity of 
God? 

Thus Political Economy gives us, on a lower plane, the same truths which 
the gospel had uttered long ago. Thus Political Economy illustrates Chris- 
tianity, and proves it to have the same Author with the laws of nature. Tims 
Political Economy prepares the way for Christ, by laying down demands 
which require the gospel as their natural complement. Economical laws in- 
deed serve much the same purpose as was served by the Mosaic law. That 



CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 459 

law prevented depraved humanity from sinking so low as it would have sunk 
without restraint or tutelage; jet, with all this negative service, the law had 
no power to lift man up to a higher life. In like manner, the laws of self- 
interest, to use the language of Professor Bascom, "catch man when he 
falls from God's life and love," and prevent him from going so far toward 
ruin as he otherwise would do, yet they have no power of themselves to 
restore him to the height from which he has fallen. Though self-interest 
and true benevolence speak the same language, and seek the same thing, 
self-interest lays down a law which she is powerless of herself to obey. — The 
Mosaic law, again, prepared the way for the gospel, by foreshadowing its 
truths, and pointing away from itself to Christ as the only source of life 
and power. So Social Science prepares the way for Christianity, by dimly 
foreshadowing its truths and pointing away from itself to another, who 
alone can complete what it lacks and furnish the fulfilment of its demands. 
Human nature can fulfill the demands of the highest self-interest only 
through the access of a higher power — a power of love and life. In this 
way, the social laws which govern mankind interlock with the moral laws, 
and require these to complement their own insufficiency and weakness. 
How could this be, if religion were not from the same source as nature? 
How could this be, if both were not true and both divine? 

Thus Political Economy and Christianity are indissolubly wedded. 
"What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." But let us not 
mistake their relative rank and importance. Although Political Economy 
helps and furthers the cause of true religion, her place is second, not first. 
And in this we get a glimpse of the relation of science in general to the 
religion which we profess. Social Science stands only as the representative 
of all the sciences, when she acknowledges her own inferiority, and serves 
as a school-master to bring the world to Christ. Uttering a stern and inex- 
orable law, she knows of none but Christ in whom that law may become a 
law of liberty and the hardness of self-interest melt into the round soft 
shape of love. And therefore, not science, but Christianity, is the hope of 
mankind. No powers of merely natural progress can ever lead humanity 
to its goal. The race, like the individual, must have a higher guidance than 
that of its own instincts and intuitions. Even the earthly Paradise of the 
philosopher and the poet can never be reached by the help of science alone. 
And the heavenly Paradise, — how infinitely far away, how barred to all 
access it is, until Christ comes out from the golden doors to take us with his 
pierced hand and lead us thither ! 

The banyan-tree of the East Indies, Is distinguished from other trees in 
this, that it never ceases growing. Travelers tell us that its branches throw 
out new roots, at first consisting of slender fibres, hanging in the air and 
growing downward, but ultimately reaching the earth's surface and striking 
in, until they themselves become minor trunks which send out new branches 
in their turn. At length the great parent trunk comes to resemble the 
central column of a cathedral chapter-house, with scores of subordinate 
shafts around it, each helping to support the vaulted canopy above, and 
adding grace and beauty to the leafy temple. In some such way as this, 
we may picture to ourselves the connection between Christianity and the 
sciences which tend to ameliorate human conditions. In a true sense they 



4G0 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

are the offspring of Christianity itself. Sent forth at first as aerial rootlets, 
they have at last found resting place and new foundation in the solid ground 
of fact, and from that time serve as independent witnesses to the truth and 
supporters of it. They are not to be dissevered from it, for their life and 
the life of the great central trunk is one. Thus, receiving strength as well 
as giving, all human knowledges stand humbly and reverently around the 
religion of love, the religion of the cross. Evermore shall Christianity, in 
its everlasting growth, send clown new roots of arts and science and civiliza- 
tion, and these shall repay their debt by guarding and strengthening their 
common mother, until the giant tree shall have embraced in itself all the 
results of the broadest and noblest human thought, reducing them to order 
as subordinate parts of one great system of which it is the centre, sancti- 
fying and pervading them with its own divine life, and uniting all in one 
organic structure of faith and knowledge, so vast and so free, that all man- 
kind may come beneath its branches and enjoy its shade and blessing. 
And so, "In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, 
shall be the tree of life, which beareth twelve manner of fruits, and yieldeth 
her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree shall be for the healing 
of the nations." 



XLV. 
GETTING AND SPENDING.* 



Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : — I thank you for this most kind 
and cordial greeting. These lights and flowers, this handsome entertainment 
and pleasant talk, represent to me the social side of Christianity. I do not 
wonder at the tendency of our population to the cities. The human heart 
feels the need of stir and sympathy. I am glad that when we get to heaven 
we are not to live in the country. The book of Revelation tells us that the 
New Jerusalem is a city, and I suppose our business is to make life here an 
earnest and type of that closeness of Christian companionship, and that 
intensity of loving activity, which belong to the city of God. 

A Social Union cannot further this end in any better way than by encour- 
aging the quiet and unpartisan discussion of social questions — especially 
such questions as the pulpit finds it difficult to treat. Well-to-do people 
have problems of their own. The answers which they give are not the same 
answers that were commonly given fifty years ago, but they are given just 
as conscientiously. What position shall we take with regard to new social 
customs which challenge either our acceptance or rejection? How shall we 
admit all the real sweetness and light of a refined civilization, while yet we 
keep our hearts safe from the serpent and the sting, that lurk beneath the 
flowers? How shall we keep an independent judgment amid the clamorous 
petitioners for our benevolent contributions, and yet never say: "Get 
thee behind me, God!" instead of "'Get thee behind me, Satan!" ? We hear 
much about the trials of poverty. Something needs tq be said about the 
trials of wealth. It is out of what I may, without much of jest, call a heart 
of deep sympathy for the rich, that I propose to speak to you for a moment 
or two of The Christian Law of Getting and of Spending. 

It is a mistake to suppose that Christianity requires a man to be poor. 
Abraham was a good Christian, — at least, he was the father of all believers, 
— and yet he was very rich. Job had a large property, and, though he lost it 
all, it was all returned to him, and more. I have no idea that the young man 
in the gospels would have been compelled to sell all that he had, if he had 
been willing to sell all that he had. Riches are recognized in Scripture, not 
only as a good, but as a means of doing good. Men may misuse them, but 
wealth is a blessing, an opportunity, an honor, a power. It is not money, 
but the supreme love of money, that is the root of all evil. Christianity pro- 
motes the virtues that make wealth — temperance, industry, foresight, self- 
denial. If all men were Christians, all men would be rich. Some day the 
meek will inherit the earth. The church is poor, mainly because she is 



* An Address at the "Ladies Meeting" of the New York Baptist Social 
Union, Delmonico's, November 1, 1883. 

461 






4G2 GETTING AND SPENDING. 

stingy. When she consecrates her all to God, God will give all to her ; the 
kings of the earth — among whom are included capitalists — shall bring their 
glory and honor into her ; the riches of the world shall be brought into her 
treasury, because her treasury and the treasury of Christ shall be one. 

This is not only good Christianity, but it is good Political Economy. There 
is a certain dignity in the origin of capital, for it is the produce of past 
labor, and is the result of saving. Capital never could have come into 
existence, except through a sacrifice of present good for the sake of the 
future. It takes a certain measure of intellectual and moral development to 
make accumulation possible. Bagehot, the English economist, says that all 
the Bourses, Exchanges, Chamber of Commerce, ought to erect statues to 
the man who first taught his fellows to live a year in advance by casting 
seed into the ground, — for he was the most daring and original of all specu- 
lators. Our savings banks prove that large classes of people have advanced 
to what, economically considered, is a high level of patience and thought- 
fulness and faith. You never heard of a savings bank among the Hottentots. 
And to accumulate great properties, and to hold them together, involve the 
exercise of these same virtues in a yet larger degree. 

Capital has a dignity due to its origin in labor and saving. But it has also 
a dignity derived from the use to which it is put. It is the help and support 
of labor. Everything saved from the produce of past labor, and made to help 
in new production, is of the nature of capital. Even the workman who merely 
owns his tools is an incipient capitalist. And the great capitalist is only a 
man who, as the result of his own or others' savings, has got into his posses- 
sion a larger set of tools. As no trade can be carried on without tools, so no 
business can be carried on without capital, and no great business can be car- 
ried on without great capital. Capital is a fund that employs workmen. 
The capitalist therefore is the greatest friend that the laborer has, — for you 
cannot have any more industry than you have capital to support it. It is 
for the interest of the world that some men should have great wealth, — for 
that wealth is productive to the owner only by performing, like the waters 
of the earth, a constant circuit. Now it is the rain that fertilizes the fields 
of agriculture; now it is the mountain stream that drives the mill-wheel of 
manufactures; now it is the broad sea that bears upon its bosom the fleets 
of commerce. Without the principle of accumulation, without aggregations 
of capital, without rich men, great public works would be impossible, the 
progress of the race would cease, and mankind would go back to barbarism. 

It is well to be rich, and neither Christianity nor Political Economy has 
anything to say against it. But how rich is it well to be? What is the law 
and limit of accumulation? I am not now asking with regard to limitations 
from without, in the shape of legal provisions, though John Stuart Mill 
thought that the excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few 
should be guarded against by limiting the amount which one can acquire by 
inheritance. This reminds me of Dr. Johnson's peculiar eulogy. Dr. John- 
sou praised the English system of primogeniture, because "it made only one 
fool in a family," — all but the eldest son had to work for their living. There 
is a tyranny over the markets which is as arbitrary as the rule of the Sultan, 
and it is a question whether this tyranny ought not to be rendered less dan- 
gerous to the public by practically limiting estates to the amount which each 



GETTING AND SPENDING. 463 

man can acquire by his own industry during a single life-time. Nor am I 
asking now with regard to the limitations imposed by merely economical 
considerations, such as the shortness of life, the decay of one's own powers, 
the increasing burdens that attend upon increasing wealth, and the uncer- 
tainty whether others who come after us, and who legally inherit our estates, 
will be able to manage the property which we get together. You remember 
the merchant in the Arabian Nights who let loose an imprisoned Genie, only 
to find that the Genie stood over him with drawn sword threatening his life. 
Should not this consideration that the wealth we create may become master 
instead of servant, to our children if not to ourselves, have something to do 
in determining when we should cease to accumulate, and should begin to 
give away? 

But the question which I wish to ask is this : What limitations upon 
accumulation should a sense of our relation to Christ impose? I take it for 
granted that we all agree with regard to the spirit and aim with which the 
acquisition of wealth should be conducted. We are not to make money for 
money's sake. That makes a man an idolater, just as much as if he wor- 
shiped a god of gold. Nor are we to make money simply to gratify a selfish 
ambition. The love of power grows by what it feeds on; it would not be 
satisfied, even if the world lay at its feet ; it is a consuming passion, and all 
the generous and spiritual elements of character melt in its fervent heat. We 
are equally agreed that a Christian man belongs, with all that he has, to 
Christ ; that, as Christ has given him his talent for money-making, he is to 
use this talent in the interest of the Giver. I should say that he has no right 
to retire from business simply to save himself trouble, and no right to do a 
small business when he can just as safely do a large one. He is bound to 
make what he has of property and ability productive for the great Owner of 
whom he is only steward and trustee, — and, not only productive, but pro- 
ductive in the highest degree possible to the powers with which Christ has 
endowed him. 

Some of you may think that, in saying this, I am removing all limits to 
accumulation. Not so. It is the utmost possible production, to which we 
are bound, not the utmost possible accumulation. And production of what? 
Woolen goods and railroad dividends ? Oh no ! there was a higher sort 
of production to which you devoted yourself when you became a Chris- 
tian man, namely, the production of holiness in the earth. Keeping your 
money going as capital is not enough, if you are a Christian. You might as 
well have it sunk in the sea, as to have it producing nothing in the way of 
the furtherance of the kingdom of God. And productiveness in this sense 
must limit the principle of mere accumulation. 

Suppose we test this matter by applying the rule in other departments of 
human activity. Here is a man eager for knowledge. His temptation is to 
seclude himself from his fellow-men, and to forget both God and humanity 
in his avidity for learning. How much knowledge may he rightfully accumu- 
late ? You answer at once : Just so much as is consistent with a healthy 
recognition of God's claims upon his soul, and the world's claims upon his 
service. In other words, he must make his learning productive, — as Lord 
Bacon says, "a rich storehouse for God's glory and man's relief," — or his 
learning will eat into his soul like a canker. Accumulation of knowledge, 



464 GETTING AND SrBNDING. 

to be Christian, must be not only with a view to ultimate wider distribution, 
hut it must be accompanied by continual distribution. The trustees of a 
hospital who should allow its funds to accumulate without end, instead of 
appropriating them to the relief of the wounded and the sick, would be 
unfaithful to their trust. So to accumulate knowledge without end is 
unfaithfulness to a higher trust, and to accumulate wealth without distrib- 
uting is equal malfeasance in the office of a steward. 

What I have said about capital will show you that I have no sympathy 
with the popular prejudice against capitalists which regards them as mere 
blood-suckers fastened upon the body politic. No, their money, whether lent 
out, or invested in stocks, or put into trade, is doing work, and in an eco- 
nomical sense is producing something continually, however little it may be 
producing in a spiritual sense. Every capitalist is a business man. When 
we come, therefore, to the practical application of this doctrine of producing 
for God, the question is substantially this: What proportion of my property 
and its income may I properly use in business? how large a business may I 
conduct? how great a capital may I use? how great an estate may I gather? 
These questions are all practically the same. I have no doubt that the day 
of small things has gone by. Daniel Safford, that model of benevolence of 
whom we heard so much when we were boys, vowed to God that he would 
never be worth more than $50,000, and all that he made over and above that, 
he faithfully gave away. But by limiting his capital, he limited its produce, 
and so limited his gifts. If a man's powers are equal to the larger produc- 
tion, I have grave doubts whether he has a right to put the limits of his 
fortune where Daniel Safford put it. For some men, it would be wrong to 
stop even with $500,000 or $5,000,000. But let us be sure about our powers, 
and about our motive. Are we gathering for God, or for ourselves? Is pro- 
duction in an economical sense subserving the other sort of production — 
production in the religious and spiritual sense? Do not tell me that you 
intend to make it so by and by. You never will be any better than you are 
now, — at least you have no right to presume that you will be. Unless you 
make the principle of accumulation subservient to the principle of benevo- 
lence now, you have no right to believe that you ever will, or that your 
wealth will be other than a curse instead of a blessing. 

Have I seemed to imply, in this address, that we are all millionaires? 
Well, we certainly look as if we were. But, lest there should be a 
single unfortunate exception, who has not yet received his portion of meat 
from this feast of reason, let me say a word or two about spending as I 
have already about getting. We all must spend. We are all consumers. 
It takes only a little while for the world to eat itself up. "Though full 
of useful and precious goods," says Dr. Walker, without constant new 
production "the world would be seedy within ten years, and beggarly 
within the life of man." And we consume luxuries as well as necessaries, — 
in fact, in our modern days a great many things once called luxuries have 
become necessaries. And this is perfectly right. God does not bring about 
a high development of our faculties without providing a corresponding 
nutriment and supply. The talk about "plain living and high thinking," 
is mostly talk. An active brain needs good food. A hard-worked man will 
live longer for having a good bed. Good fires aud good clothes are dimin 






GETTING AND SPENDING. 465 

ishing the chances of death and are enriching the life insurance companies. 
And God cares for men's tastes, for he has created them in the image of his 
own. He himself loves beauty, and he has made us to love it — the beauty 
of nature not only, but the beauty of art — symphonies and statues, pictures 
and noble piles of architecture. It is just as right, within certain limits, to 
spend money for such things, as it is to spend it for daily bread. But as 
Christian people, it is very important to understand the principle and the 
limit of this luxurious consumption. 

I hear a false principle frequently advocated. I do not say that any of us 
advocate it. I will illustrate it by the court of the third Napoleon. When 
a lady of the court appeared a second time in the same dress, the Empress 
Eugenie gently admonished her that she had "admired that dress before." 
And the wasteful extravagance of the Tuilleries was defended, upon the 
ground that it kept a great many silk manufacturers and milliners at work, 
and so encouraged industry. Well, it would keep men at work, to some 
extent, if we spread gold broad-cast over our walls, and had for our dinners, 
as the Romans did, dishes composed of the brains of birds of Faradise. But 
who does not see that it will keep more men at work, and for a longer time. 
to put the same sum into productive business? $1,000, spent in luxury, 
will pay $1,000 of wages. $1,000, employed as capital, will in ten years pay 
$20,000 of wages, and will go on increasing its power of supporting labor so 
long as it is thus employed. As a celebrated economist has said: — "'Wealth 
spent in luxury is the fierce blaze of the burning house, which may warm a 
few for a moment, but which soon goes out, leaving only desolation." 

And so we see the Christian limit of luxurious consumption. We must 
be able to show that our spending does the greatest possible good. Though 
We were worth a hundred millions, it never would be right to waste. We 
are stewards of God's estate; we own nothing in fee-simple; we are set to 
administer our earthly property for God. Now a temperate and well pro- 
portioned luxury, by which I mean a proper provision for the satisfaction 
of our tastes and social instincts, does bring forth fruit for God, both in 
ourselves and in others. Such luxury is a spring of beneficent activity; it 
stimulates men for life's toils; it repairs life's waste; it lets loose our higher 
powers ; it repays its cost many times over. The Athenian Stoic was content 
with "figs and philosophy." We need something more. I once saw a 
Christian home, where I thought luxury and principle went hand in hand. 
It was a solid, spacious, English-like structure. There were servants, and 
there was plate. There were pictures of worth, and costly books. But there 
was not the slightest ostentation. One would have thought the family had 
lived there a thousand years. And when the son of the family greeted me — ■ 
a beautiful youth, six feet and two inches tall and straight as an arrow, 
ingenuous and modest, yet with a natural distinction of manner that showed 
that he was "to the manor born," I recognized the fact that wealth had not 
spoiled, but had helped, education. 

You say I have not yet told you how far this expenditure may go. I will 
tell you now. Just so far as is consistent with loving God supremely, and 
your neighbor as yourself. No luxury can be Christian, that tends to lead 
my neighbor into sin. The traveler on one of the splendid steamers of the 
river Rhine sometimes observes that the engines have suddenly stopped. 
30 



466 GETTING AND SPENDING. 

Looking ahead he perceives a low, grimy coal-barge, so heavily laden that 
her gunwales are near the water's edge. The swell in the wake of the great 
steamer, if she kept up her full speed, would be sufficient to wash over the 
sides of the barge and sink her. So the larger vessel stops her engines and, 
with the momentum already gained, glides quietly by till the barge is out of 
danger. We are to consult the interests of others, and not to please our- 
selves. Let us be sure that the swell and bravery of our display and indul- 
gence does not sink some humbler craft, which otherwise might have reached 
its destined haven. 

No luxury can be Christian, that hardens the heart against the calls of dis- 
tress. When the heavy draperies of our curtains become so thick as wholly 
to shut out the wail of the great suffering and sinning race, then the curtains 
had better come down. No luxury can be Christian, which makes this life, 
with its glitter and its pleasure, the be-all and the end-all of existence. 

" This life of mortal breath 

Is ante-chamber to the life Elysian, 
Whose portal we call death." 

The luxury that would persuade us to find our Paradise here, and to forget 
the Paradise beyond, is a false luxury, and full of poisou to the soul. Beauty 
and pleasure are not ends in themselves, but means to a higher end — the 
production of the true and the good, and the preparation of our souls for 
heaven. As Bonar, the sweetest religious poet of Scotland, has sung: — 

" 'T is first the true and then the beautiful, 
Not first the beautiful and then the true ; 
First the wild moor, with rock and sedge and pool, 
Then the gay garden, rich in scent and hue. 

" 'T is first the good and then the beautiful. 
Not first the beautiful and then the good ; 
First the rough seed, sown in the rougher soil, 
Then the flower trellis, and the branching wood. 

" Not first the glad and then the sorrowful. 
But first the sorrowful and then the glad ; 
Tears for a day — for earth of tears is full, — 
Then we forget that we were ever sad. 

" Not first the bright and after that the dark, 
But first the dark and after that the bright; 
First the black cloud, and then the rainbow's arc, 
First the dark grave, then resurrection light. 

" 'T is first the night — dark night of storm and war, 
Thick night of heavy clouds and veiled skies ; 
Then the fair sparkle of the morning star, 
That bids the saints awake, and dawn arise." 

And so Christianity bids us bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the 
law of Christ. Are you rich? Then it would seem to me that you ought 
not to spend more upon yourself, than you spend on others. And if you are 
very rich why should you not use your opportunity to give all your increase 
to God, that with it he may send the gospel into the heart of some heathen 
empire, or build up some great institution that shall train the future teachers 
of the church? And still you wish to ask me further questions — about 
horses, and pictures, and yachts? Well, I am glad that I am not set to be 
the keeper of your conscience, or anr other human being's but my own. 



GETTING AND SPENDING. 467 

God gives us bis law of love and the example of Christ's sacrifice, — and he 
says to us: 'As I have loved you, so love my cause. Do all to the glory of 
God. He that soweth sparingly shall reap sparingly, but he that soweth 
bountifully shall reap bountifully. As the Lord hath prospered you, so give. 
Be good stewards of the manifold grace of God." It indicates the rank and 
dignity of each of us in the creation that, with these principles before us, we 
are left to determine our duty solitarily before God. Life is a probation, — 
our characters are revealing themselves, — we are fixing our place and des- 
tiny for eternity. But nothing in our earthly life will better show what we 
are, and where we belong forever, than our getting and spending. 



XLVI. 
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST.' 



The subject of this lecture is Egypt and Palestine. But do not mistake 
me, — I do not mean the Egypt and Palestine about which you have hoard 
so much, and upon which it is so eminently proper to deliver lectures. That 
is very commonly an ideal Egypt and Palestine. The subject of my lecture 
is only the Egypt and Palestine that I saw. Cicero says that "the eye sees 
only that which it brings with it the power of seeing," and such as I have 
I give you, — namely, a few personal Recollections of the East. I shall not 
imitate a former townsman of mine, who began his history of Rochester 
with an account of the glacial epoch, nor shall I follow the example of 
Knickerbocker's History of New York, which commences with the Creation. 
1 shall take you at once to the gates of the Orient. I shall claim the privi- 
lege of being as uninstructive as I please. If any of you have ever read 
Mr. Kinglake's Eothen, that rose-colored but fascinating book of Eastern 
travel, you have not forgotten the solemn strain in which the author warns 
his readers, in the preface, that from all useful information, from all valu- 
able statistics, and from all moral and religious reflections, his work will be 
thoroughly free. I am half inclined to begin my lecture with a like warn- 
ing. I wish, at least, to bar all disappointment, by premising that I am to 
give, not an elaborate and logical and scientific account of Egypt and the 
Holy Land, but simply a few jottings of what I saw, and how I felt, as I 
wandered through those regions of ancient story. 

Very early one morning, in the latter part of March, the Frenchman who 
occupied the lower berth of the state-room woke me with the words: "Alex- 
andrie, — Alexandrie ! " We had been steaming it all the way from Naples and 
Malta for the last four days, and I had got quite a sufficient idea of the extent 
of the Mediterranean. I needed no second call, and in a few moments was on 
deck. During the night we had anchored in the harbor, and now, as the sun 
rose and the morning breeze played upon the surface of the water, I took my 
first view of Alexandria. The picture-books were all true, and more tha 1 
true. Unmistakably Egyptian was the long low shore-line of yellow sano 
and the long yellow line of city houses. Here and there an isolated palir. 
tree seemed like an emerald in a golden setting, while on the outskirts of th< 
city were patches of green grass and groves of palms whose trunks looked 
like slender columns of a temple, supporting a roof of Gothic fan -work. 
The golden glow of the East was over all. The morning was warm, but 
bright and cloudless — a perfect Egyptian spring morning. In four days 1 
had journeyed from April to June. I began to realize how that person 



* A Lecture before the Robinson Rhetorical Society of the Rochester Theo 
logical Seminary, February 25, 1S78. 

468 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 4G9 

must feel who is knocked into the middle of next week. One can live in 
a perpetual spring, if he will only chase it wherever it flies. Yet I must 
confess to something like a smiting of conscience, as I stood on the deck of 
Her Majesty's steamer and remembered how I had cast contempt on the 
almanac, and substituted one long May for December, January, February, 
and March. 

The sun had hardly emerged above the horizon, before a dozen boats, 
manned by natives, put out from shore to welcome us. And what a wel- 
come ! Such yelling and gesticulation ! I once thought that American 
hotel-runners could get up as perfect an extempore Babel as any set of 
mortals, but I believe now that they must yield the palm to these Egyptians. 
An overwhelming torrent of Arabic jargon, bearing on its bosom the dis- 
jecta membra of murdered French. English, and Italian words! Willi 
voices keyed at the highest pitch, and with faces apparently frantic with 
excitement, each one of these swarthy creatures begged, besought, implored 
you, to take his boat. We looked on as placidly as possible for awhile ; but 
alas, the harbor was shallow ; the steamer could not get nearer shore ; we 
had come to see Egypt ; we must leave the vessel ; we could not swim ashore ; 
we were shut up to taking a boat ; and so, after driving the best bargain we 
could, we committed ourselves to the mercies of half a dozen stalwart tatter- 
demalions, with much the same feelings that one would have on resigning 
himself to a lot of Comanches, to be scalped or to be set up as a mark for 
juvenile savages to shoot at. Once in the boat, the uproar quieted down so 
much that we began to think our tribulations over. As we approached the 
shore, however, I lifted my eyes, and to my dismay beheld a regiment of 
Arab donkey-drivers, the only hackmen of the East, lining the whole shore 
where we were to land, and stretching out their arms towards us, while they 
uttered such ominous cries as "Mosu! Mosu ! want a donkey?" Here my 
French friend was invaluable. I had seen him, a number of times on the 
voyage, affectionately fondling a good stout shillalah. I had asked him what 
the purpose of the stick was, but he had only replied that he had a little 
grudge to settle with the donkey-boys at Alexandria. Now I saw the admir- 
able results of living on the maxim: "Forewarned, forearmed," — for, no 
sooner had the Frenchman leaped on shore, than he began to lay about him 
like mad, right and left, front and rear, till the donkey-boys fell back in 
utter confusion, and he led us in triumph through the routed host. 

We next fell into the clutches of the Custom House Inspector, an officer 
whose chief end is to collect "baksheesh," or tribute-money, for not examin- 
ing baggage. We propitiated His Excellency with a sixpence, and escaped 
scot-free. Then a lot of Arab porters surrounded us. The moment the 
Custom House Examiner signified that the baggage was all right, half a 
dozen squalid wretches made a dive for each separate article, and in less 
time than it takes to tell it. our baggage was scattered to the four winds, 
and nothing was to be heard but yells of "Mosu! hotel?" It was a flank 
movement on the Frenchman, for his back was turned at the moment. It 
was only a temporary reverse however, for the thick stick came to the 
rescue. It brought the most obstinate to terms, and sent the rest flying. In 
a few minutes, we were hurrying after two or three Arabs who had contracted 
to serve as baggage- wagons, and who succeeded, to our surprise, in shoulder- 



470 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 

ing all our trunks, hat-boxes, and valises. When we reached the betel we 
found it completely full. On seeking another, we discovered the case to be 
the same there. A host of English passengers were in town on their way 
to India, via Suez. It was on toward noon before we succeeded in getting 
breakfast, and the crowd so completely destroyed all comfort that we con- 
cluded to take the railway that afternoon to Cairo. 

That railway ride gave us a fine chance to see the Egyptian landscape. 
The country is very flat. Nothing like a hill is to be seen. Meadows clothed 
in the most beautiful verdure alternate with sandy plains and desolate yel- 
low mounds — the only remains perhaps of ancient cities, — but mounds on 
which are now clustered the mud-huts of the modern Egyptians. Now and 
then a grove of palms varied the monotony of the scene, and twice between 
Cairo and Alexandria the railway crosses the Nile. I shall never forget the 
awe with which I first looked upon this mighty and mysterious river, on 
whose banks early idolatry built its temples and the first great empire of the 
earth arose. Here was the source of Greek mythology, and the home of the 
oldest science and civilization. Wonderful river ! emblematic of the history 
and influence of the land through which it flows. With sources lost in dis- 
tance, and fertilizing vast spaces of otherwise desert land, it leaves its home 
at last, and mingling with the sea bears Egyptian waters to Greece and 
Italy. The Nile was very low, but its current was swift and broad, and even 
in crossing it by railway we could see that it was one of the grandest of 
rivers. Railroading in Egypt never exceeds fifteen miles an hour, and long 
before we reached Cairo at midnight, we had lost all recollections of our 
breakfast. We did what we could to console ourselves with oranges, which 
the Arab boys sold at three for a penny. When we reached the great Hotel 
of Cairo, all was dark. Just inside the door a great stout negro porter was 
lying in true eastern fashion across the threshold, fast asleep. After kick- 
ing him about like a foot-ball for a few minutes, we managed to wake him, 
and it was not long before a number of tired howadji were slumbering safely 
inside the mosquito-nets. 

Two days in Cairo — and two days only, — for the season was late, and 
Palestine was before us. We had to see the greatest amount possible in the 
smallest possible time. So, at seven o'clock the next morning, we started 
for the pyramids. My dragoman Selim, as is invariably the case, was the 
prince of interpreters and guides. Each of us mounted a stout donkey, and 
behind the donkeys followed the inevitable donkey-boy, armed with a long 
stick. We had no more to do with the running of the donkeys than a pas- 
senger has to do with the running of a railway train, — the donkey-boy was 
both engineer and conductor. Our business was simply to hold on, and to 
let the animals run. They were sometimes disinclined to go faster than a 
walk, and then the donkey-boy's stick was very efficacious. Though you 
may scarcely believe it, we rode the donkey and the donkey-boy ran behind. 
thirty-six miles that day, in twelve hours, including at least an hour and a 
half of stoppages. That day I visited the pyramids, the Apis-Cemetery of 
Sakkara, and the remains of Memphis, and returned at night to Cairo, the 
sorest mortal that ever dismounted from a donkey. 

The ride for the first few hours was very delightful. Every step showed 
something new in Oriental life or customs or scenery. The narrow and dirtj 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 471 

street* of Cairo, sometimes roofed over with matting to exclude the sun. tho 
bazaars, with a sober, squatting, cross-legged Egyptian smoking his chibouk 
at the entrance of every little shop, the women with faces half-covered after 
the eastern custom, but with sharp black eyes that still glanced at the Frank 
over the edges of the dark veil, the Arab jargon of quarreling ferrymen, the 
camels with their long necks and ungainly strut and enormous burdens, 
taking up the whole street as they walked, the noble gateways adorned with 
Arabesques and inscriptions from the Koran, which now and then appeared 
among the squalid and ugly habitations of the poor, — all these were new to 
me. I was in the midst of the Orient. I saw dozens of boys who might 
have served for excellent Aladdins, and it was no small task at times to 
repress the fancy that I was some personage of the Arabian Nights, and liv- 
ing "in the days of good Haroun al Raschid." All around me were sights 
and sounds utterly different from the sights and sounds of Europe ; it was 
all a new world and a new age, — no, not that, — it was the old world and the 
old age, which we moderns have so far, far outgrown. 

Outside the city the road wound through endless groves of palm and tam- 
arisk and cassia. The grass was green and fresh, but the flowers were all of 
novel shape and hue, — everywhere the brilliant and luxurious vegetation of 
the tropics. So, until we stood almost under the solemn shadow of the 
Pyramids, the morning's ride was a continual succession of beauties and 
surprises. Then came a change. In a few minutes, we had passed from 
greenness and tropical beauty to long tracts of desert sand. The Pyramids 
stand on the very edge of the desert. As you toil up the steep sand-covered 
bank on which they are built, they seem to rise before you as giant warders 
of that vast region of sterility and death. 

The ascent of the Great Pyramid was rather comical. As we passed the 
last straggling collection of mud-huts on our way to them, two or three Arabs 
from each village started up from the ground where they had been lying in 
the sun, and followed us, as persistently as hounds would follow a hare. 
When we arrived at the foot of the great Pyramid, we had about twenty of 
them about us, as rascally a set in appearance as one often sees. The regu- 
lar charge of the Sheikh for ascending the Pyramid and exploring the inte- 
rior is five English shillings, and for this sum he is compelled to furnish 
three stout Arabs to assist and guide each traveler. A dozen others, however, 
always beset you with offers of aid and demands of "baksheesh," and their 
importunities' are not so easy to resist, especially when they have you com- 
pletely in their power, as they do at some stages of your explorations. 
Determining in my own mind that I would yield to no such demands, and 
leaving all superfluous clothing and all my money behind me for safe keeping 
with the dragoman, I gave each hand to a lank Arab, who looked as if he 
would gladly cut my throat for a sixpence, and began the ascent. A third 
Arab followed, and furnished the "boosts" from behind. All this assistance 
is very necessary, — for the outside of the. Pyramid, though it was originally 
smooth, is now a series of rough steps about three feet high. 

With the help of the Arabs, the ascent at first seemed quite novel and 
amusing. As they pulled me up they sang a sort of chant together, the 
words of which were of all languages, and ran somewhat as follows : 
"Mosu good — hard work — no 'fraid — Jack and Jill — baksheesh; — Mas'r rest 



472 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 

— take care — not far — Mosu good — hard work — baksheesh." They sang It 
over and over again, with all sorts of variations, but I noticed that the most 
enthusiastic part of the song was always the "baksheesh." As we neared 
the half-way station, the chorus on "baksheesh" became quite overpowering. 
When I sat down on a stone to rest, the Arab rascals surrounded me, stuck 
their fists nearly into my face, and demanded a donation. Whereupon I 
smiled very graciously, and told them I was ready to go on again. It was 
not so graciously that they consented, but finally, consent they did, and In 
a few minutes I was upon the summit of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, four 
hundred and fifty feet above the plain below. 

Of course I meditated more or less, — as much as the hot day and the 
fatiguing ascent and the bothersome Arabs would allow. Beneath my feet 
was the monument of one of earth's oldest dynasties — the appropriate record 
of a crushing despotism that fortunately ceased to curse the world as many 
as forty centuries ago. And yet what a monument it is — this great stone- 
mountain on the sandy plain ! There is a science exhibited in its construc- 
tion, which has never been surpassed. It is the recorded verdict of competent 
engineers, "that, with all the progress of modern knowledge, it would be 
even in our days a problem difficult to solve, to construct as did these 
Egyptian architects of the fourth dynasty, in such a mass as that of the 
Pyramid, chambers and passages, which, in spite of the seven millions of 
tons pressing upon them, have for four thousand years preserved their orig- 
inal shape without crack or flaw." But what shall be said of the view from 
the summit? It certainly reveals to you the vanity of human ambition. 
The vast pile that was once reared in the midst of life and beauty now stands 
alone in the desert. The encroaching sands have flowed in, till around this 
mausoleum of Egypt's greatest monarch, all is now a solitude. The dreary 
yellow plain stretches away on one side, as far as the eye can reach. But 
while on one side all is silent and desolate as the grave, on the other side 
the distant prospect is as bright and beautiful as ever presented itself tc 
Mioses upon Pisgah. There is the soft green of meadow and field, of wav- 
ing wheat and stately palm, all growing by the banks of the unfailing river, 
while the minarets of Cairo shine in the sunlight miles away. Who could 
help making the one side a picture of the end of earthly greatness, and the 
other a picture of the life and beauty that shall perpetually abide upon the 
banks of the river of the water of life on high ? 

Why should we ever come down from Pisgah? Why should there be such 
tribulations as Arab guides? The rest of my meditations are not recorded, 
because there were none. The three cut-throat-looking rascals became too 
obstreperous. They demanded "baksheesh." There was no escape but 
in starting down again — the Arabs looking daggers enough, though they did 
not go so far as to show any. And I found my account in not yielding to 
them. When we came to the narrow passage-way more than half-way down, 
which leads you into the very heart of the Pyramid, I was relieved of the 
company of a dozen or more supernumerary savages who were waiting there 
for the opportunity of entering with me. Woe to the man to whom that 
happens! Woe to the man who has to witness an Arab dance in the King's 
Chamber, through the stifling dust kicked up by a score of naked feet, and 
then has to pay for it roundly or submit to have his lights blown out, and be 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 473 

left to find his way to the open air alone I Such tilings have been, epoe- 
tins occasion, however, only two Arabs accompanied me. I saw the interior 
of the Pyramid under quite favorable circumstances. I confess that I have 
no desire ever to see it again. Of all places in the world detestable to sen- 
sitive knees and nostrils, commend me to the passages of the Great Pyramid. 
The entrance-passage is only four feet high, and as we held our candles in 
our hands and wen! bending half double all the way, through an air in which 
seemed concentrated all the heat of Egypt's suns and all the choking dust of 
Egypt's deserts, the impressions we received were, to say the least, not wholly 
agreeable. On reaching the bottom of tne first passage, which inclines down- 
ward for sixty feet or so, a turn to the right brings you to a place where you 
are obliged to ascend a perpendicular wall for a little distance, by putting 
your feet into the crevices of the stones. This brings you to the second 
passage, which takes you up a steep incline a hundred and twenty feet long, 
and as low and fatiguing as the first. Here you pass the entrance to what 
was once called the great well of the Pyramid — a well that was said to pene- 
trate far below its foundations aud to connect with the Nile, but which more 
recent investigations have shown to lead to a subterranean chamber, and 
which, with the chamber itself, is above the highest level of the overflow of 
the river. After this comes a third low horizontal passage-way which con- 
ducts you to the King's Chamber, a room thirty-four feet long by seventeen 
broad and nineteen in height. Lighted only by a couple of candles, this 
apartment seemed dusky enough. The air was thick aud heavy, and, though 
it was a relief to stand upright once more, the gloom and undefined extent 
of tins dark and silent chamber were quite oppressive. I was scarcely in it 
before 1 should have been glad to be out. At one end are still the remains 
of a sarcophagus, hacked and hammered at by tourists, in which a king of 
Egypt lay undisturbed so many centuries. The first plunderers of the Pyra- 
mids doubtless stole the wooden coffin, with the mummy and treasures it 
contained, and thus prevented it from gracing the shelf of some foreign 
Museum. Old Sir Thomas Brown said well: "In vain do men hope for 
preservation below the moon. Mummy has become merchandise, and Pha- 
raoh is sold for balsams." 

But, not to describe the exit from the Pyramid aud the hot ride over the 
scorching sand to Sakkara and Memphis, let me simply say that it was quite 
late when we got back to Cairo. The sun went down in a cloudless sky, and 
yet the sunset was peculiarly deep and glowing. The air itself seemed 
tinged with yellow and crimson, and the whole west was radiant with golden 
light. There was no twilight. Scarcely had the sun set, when it was already 
dark and cold. The stars came out, with that intense and piercing lustre 
that is never seen save in an Eastern clime. I could not wonder that Astron- 
omy was first of sciences, or that the wandering tribes who watched their 
flocks by night could gaze upon these stars in their long walks through the 
sky, and could imagine that they had peculiar and intimate relations with 
all human fortunes. I could have looked at them myself till they paled 
before the rising day. We made a triumphal entry into Cairo after the suc- 
cessful accomplishment of that day's tour, — an entry that deserves to be 
commemorated. The donkey-boy, after his thirty-six miles' run, kept the 
donkeys still at full speed, and trotted behind, panting like a dog, and 



474 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 

belaboring the beasts as be went. The streets of Cairo were crowded witb 
men, women and children, — many of tbem with what looked like Chinese 
paper lanterns in their hands. It was a regulation of the police, in fact, that 
no person should walk the streets at night without one. But police were not 
worth much in Cairo. There was no gas, and many of the streets, especially 
the less important and more narrow of them, though full of human beings, 
were wrapped in the blackest darkness. I first understood that evening what 
'dark as Egypt" meant. Dowu these streets our donkey-boy propelled 
the donkeys at full gallop. Commanding us to let go the reins, and nourish- 
ing his big stick, he ran behind us, yelling at the top of his lungs to all who 
valued their lives to get out of the way. How many fathers and mothers of 
families we ran over, in that headlong race, I cannot say. I know we did run 
over some, and were followed by deluges of Arabic curses, as we swept 
through the dark and narrow streets. But what possibility was there of 
resistance? what use of remonstrance? The donkey-boy was evidently out 
of his head. Spite of all our appeals to him, nothing could stop his yells 
and his slashing of the beasts, and we had to resign ourselves to a ride that 
seemed like the mythical gallop by the side of the Black Huntsman. The 
donkey-boy certainly did not make his appearance next day. Whether he 
ever survived his long run, and still preserved the use of his faculties after 
acting so like mad that night, has remained a most profound mystery until 
this very day. 

But enough for Egypt. Two days after, we sailed from Alexandria in a 
steamer of the Austrian Lloyds. Another two days of windy weather brought 
us to Beyrout, where our journey in the Holy Land was to begin. Few 
cities of the world are more beautifully situated. The majestic mass of 
snow-crowned Lebanon was in full view, and the yellow houses of merchants 
and missionaries scattered among the groves and gardens, on the slopes of 
the bay, gave the town an air of unusual elegance and prosperity. The 
weather was deligtfully warm, clear and bright, with comfortable nights 
and cloudless blue skies. On the flat roof of the hotel we walked up and 
down, in the moonlight evening, and laid our plans for the journey before us. 
Some delay was necessary before our arrangements were perfected. The 
first essential was to secure a good dragoman, for on the possession of a 
competent and experienced interpreter, steward and guide, all your comfort 
and security depend. We engaged a man at last who agreed to furnish 
horses, baggage-mules, tents, servants, cook, and all the requisites of a good 
living on the way. The contract was that he was to pay all expenses of every 
sort, taking us wherever we pleased to go, for an English pound a day fur 
each person. There was a time when the traveler had to rough it in Pales- 
tine. Except at Beyrout, Jaffa, Jerusalem and Damascus, there are no such 
things as hotels. You must carry tents with you, and buy and cook your 
own provisions on the way. But modern science has reduced all this to a 
system. The dragoman surprises you with a set of beautifully embroidered 
and ornamented tents — a sleeping-tent, a dining-tent, and a cooking-tent. 
The first two are furnished with Persian carpets, and the sleeping-tent Is 
provided with light iron bt fisteads, mattresses and linen, camp-stools and all 
the ordinary apparatus for performing the toilet. You can have five courses 
fur your dinner, got up by your French cook, if you desire it and are willing 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 475 

to pay for it, — and so you may fare, though you camp in the desert. And 
you will have appetite enough to eat through all the five, if your experience 
is like mine. A ride of thirty miles on one of those Arab horses will give a 
keen relish when you sit down to dinner at seven o'clock in the evening. 
The horseback riding is indeed the great benefit to health, of a tour in Pal- 
estine. The horses may not be remarkable for beauty, but if they are of 
real Arab blood, they will show an amount of spirit and fire that will delight 
you. An Arab horse before starting may seem a tame and homely creature. 
After the start he seems to have changed his nature. At the least touch of 
the whip, he flies like the wind. Remember that there are no roads in Pales- 
tine. Mountain mule-tracks are the only approach to them. The Arab horse 
has never traveled except under the saddle, — the very sight of a wagon or 
carriage is so novel that it frightens him, — but his kindness and gentleness 
are beyond all praise. His step is proud and elastic, and he will go up and 
down places in those rocky mountain-paths where the rider holds his breath. 
Sharp-sighted and sure-footed, he will carry you ten hours a day, and look 
as well at the end of a month's journey as he did at the beginning. 

It takes no long time to see the chief things of note in Palestine. We 
often form quite an erroneous notion of the extent of the Holy Land. A 
narrow region a hundred and fifty miles in length by fifty miles in breadth 
includes all the celebrated spots of sacred story. It is doubtful whether 
our Savior, during his public ministry, ever traversed an extent of territory 
as large as the State of Connecticut or New Hampshire. The whole of 
Palestine could be put between Rochester and Albany, and you would still 
have fifty miles to spare. From three or four elevations you can see the 
whole of it, — and, if there were any lofty mountain near the centre of the 
country, you could see the whole land from one single point of view. But, 
while Palestine is a small land, it is so situated as to be a meeting-place for 
other lands. The great caravan-route between Egypt and Assyria passed 
up her western coast and south of Lebanon through Damascus. In times of 
peace, Palestine was a thoroughfare for the traffic of the wo-Vi ; in times of 
war, the great heathen monarchies on either side of her contended for the 
possession of her territory, as a strategic point from which to conduct their 
military operations. So far from being true is the old notion that Palestine 
was a country chosen by God as a place of seclusion for his people, — it is 
rather true that it was a converging-point for the influences of civilization 
— a sort of highway of the nations. 

I do not mean that every inhabitant of Palestine lived a public life, but I 
do mean that the land itself was so shaped at the beginning as to draw into 
it the currents of the world's trade — hence the wealth of Solomon and 
Hezekiah ; so shaped as to give out religious and moral influence — hence 
the Hebrew culture of Alexandria and of Babylon. Palestine was a narrow 
land — and yet the only practicable and easy path for land-travel between 
the east and the west. Bounded on the west by the Great Sea, the mod- 
ern Mediterranean, and on the east by the desolate table-lands of Bashan 
and Perea, — with the great mountain ranges of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon 
at the north, and the Arabian desert at the south, it might at first seem as 
if it were a land separated from all other lands. But no, there were loop- 
holes through which trade could pass and did pass,- — and through these 



47G RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 

loop-boles ran the only practicable avenue for commerce. Jerusalem lay 
among the hills to the east of this traffic, and usually was not disturbed by 
it ; but Jerusalem was too near not to feel its influence. No oue can study 
the surroundings of Palestine in connection with its history, without being 
convinced that God formed the land at .lie creation, not only to be the 
theatre of a divine revelation, but also to be the centre from which that rev- 
elation should be disseminated through tbe world. God called Abraham 
out from among the heathen, and iu this land educated him and his de- 
scendants to the belief in the divine unity, spirituality, and hoiinee 
that he iniglit in this way be prepared to communicate the blessings of trot 
religion to the whole earth. The interest we have in Palestine to-day 
is this, that it constitutes the school-house where the teachers of the world 
were taught; tbe stage upon which the mightiest scenes of human history 
were acted out; the presence-chamber where God revealed himself to patri- 
archs, kings and prophets ; the sacred soil which Jesus' feet once trod, an<l 
on which the cross was erected for the redemption of mankind; the Starting- 
point from which the apostles of the gospel of peace set forth for the con- 
quest of tbe world. 

How wonderfully fitted Palestine was for all these purposes of divine 
revelation, you can hardly realize till you travel over it from end to end. 
For it is not only a small land, and a meeting-place for other lands, — it is, 
besides, as Isaac Taylor has said, a sample-land of all lands. Every trav- 
eler can find the climate and scenery of his own country in Palestine. The 
Hebrew poet found near at hand the materials which the poet of other 
lands must seek by distant travel. Follow the course of the Jordan from 
the spot where it springs from the rocks, a full-grown river, until it emp- 
ties into the Dead Sea, and you pass from the Arctic cold of Hermon's 
glaciers to the torrid heats of tha plains of Jericho, where in summer it is 
hotter than in any other place except Aden. There are mountain 
and plain, stream and forest, thunders and floods, lakes and flowers. Tbe 
sun flares up from behind the mountain-wall of Edom, rejoicing as a bride- 
groom, and that same sun sets in the Great Sea. Surrounded with tbi - 
wonderfully transparent air, and under the brightness of these stars, the 
writers of the Bible lived and thought and prayed. This wonderful variety 
of scenery and imagery renders the Bible intelligible and vivid in its des- 
criptions to the inhabitants of all other lands. ''Think," says the writer we 
have quoted, "what the Bible would be, if it had beeu written iu Iceland,*' 
and how much of it would be impossible for us to understand, — and you 
will begin to admire the wisdom of God in selecting Palestine as the theatre 
for his revelation. 

Our first route was along the shore of the Mediterranean, almost the 
whole length of the land to Jaffa, the ancient Joppa. Compared with the 
common route through the interior which we were afterwards to txavfers . 
the ride was one of considerable sameness, and yet how strong and deep 
were the feelings which were called forth by the broken columns of Sidon 
and Tyre, of Cacsarea and Joppa ! And then Mount Carmel by the sea, with 
the spot of Elijah's sacrifice, and Sarepta, a city of Sidon, where the prophet 
dwelt with the poor widow, and whither Christ himself once came. Our 
track lay along the very margin of the sea. so that now and then our horses' 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 471 

hoofs were bathed in the foam of the Mediterranean waves. Then, for a 
number of miles, we would leave the smooth but dreary sand, and cut off so my 
promontory by going inland. In climbing the Tyrian ladder, our horses 
carried us over a steep and frightful path cut in the edge of the rocky prec- 
ipice where it projects over the sea, so that, while we stumbled up the giddy 
steps, the hoarse waves sounded from the rocky caverns beneath our feet. 
We generally succeeded in reaching a village by nightfall, and in finding a 
good camping-place in the vicinity. At Sidon we camped on the edge of a 
Mohammedan graveyard. By common report the graveyard was haunted by 
Ghouls. We heard jackals howling there all night with long and piteous 
i ries. in the morning, dozens of Mohammedan women came to the grave, 
as Mary and Martha did of old, to weep there. And a mournful noise they 
made; though, after the weeping was concluded, they came over to the edge 
of our camp and gazed at our breakfast preparations for a half hour to- 
gether. As we got further south, leaving Acca and Carmel behind us, our 
company was enlarged by the addition of two other parties, who joined us 
for safety. Our retinue was rather an imposing one. It consisted of twenty 
ladies and gentlemen, half a dozen dragomans and servants, and some sixty 
baggage-mules and horses. The coast here was swarming with Bedouin 
robbers, and the travel was as dangerous as in any part of Palestine. A 
merciless set they were. Only the day before our arrival, a German gentle- 
man straying from his party was plundered and stripped by the Arabs, and 
reached the convent on Carmel entirely naked. The gentlemen of our party 
were almost all armed with revolvers, however, and we were quite equal to 
any attack. 

The ruins of Caesarea are the most extensive and striking of any in Pales- 
tine. The scene is one of perfect desolation. Not a house or hut exists 
within miles of the place. The remains of the ancient city are colossal. 
Immense fragments of the old mole, into which are built splendid granite 
columns of earlier edifices, lie heaped one upon another, while the shore is 
strewn with a wreck of marble pillars and massive walls. Caesarea is full of 
interest, even in its utter solitude. Here lived Cornelius, and here first the 
Holy Spirit was poured out upon the Gentiles. Here Herod met his ter- 
rible death, in the city which he deemed the most splendid monument of 
his greatness. Here Paul was imprisoned two long years, made his noble 
defense before Felix and Agrippa, and from this very port he set out on his 
eventful voyage to Rome. The wild flowers are growing now amid the 
ruins of Caesarea's temples, the waves are dashing over the remains of its 
ancient wealth and glory, and Paul and his judges have long, long ago been 
summoned before another and a grander tribunal. 

So we passed on to Jaffa, the ancient Joppa, and the next day we climbed 
the steep, rugged, barren road that leads up and up to the summit of the 
great rocky water-shed of Palestine, and then over its crest to Jerusalem, the 
Holy City. No one who has not seen Palestine with his own eyes can com- 
prehend the excessively mountainous character of the country. There are 
only a few square miles of level land from one end of it to the other. Ever- 
lasting masses of yellow limestone hills succeed one another as you go, for 
the most part devoid of all appearance of greenness or beauty, except where 
here and there you light upon a lot of struggling gray olive trees. After a 



478 RECOLLECTIONS OF TIIE EAST. 

long ride under a hot sun, tbe approach to any city would have roused our 
enthusiasm, but what shall I say of tbe approach to Jerusalem? It will live 
in memory, as long as memory lasts. In our anxiety to catcb tbe first glimpse 
of the Holy City, we had pushed our horses on far ahead of the baggage- 
mules, and one or two of us, more eager than the rest, and unable any longer 
to endure a slow trot, galloped on alone to tbe last ridge which separated us 
from the city to which so many for ages have made pilgrimage. A moment 
more and tbe domes and minarets and battlemented .walls of Jerusalem lay 
before us, and beyond, tbe long yellow mass of the Mount of Olives, dotted 
here and there with tbe trees from which it takes its name. One has not 
from this side the finest or even a fine view of the city, and yet the feelings 
with which we approached it were not renewed in their freshness and fullness 
when we gazed on it afterwards, from other points of view. Even here, as 
we saw tbe hills that shut it in on every side, it was easy to feel the force of 
David's words: "As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord 
is round about his people." Zion and Moriah, the western and eastern 
mounts on which the city is built, and the dome of tbe Mosque of Omar, 
which stands on the site of tbe ancient temple, were all clearly risible, and 
over walls and ramparts and towers, as well as over the whole city enclosed 
within them, lay a warm, golden sunshine, so silent and calm that, as we 
looked down upon it from a distance, it almost seemed deserted, like a city 
of the dead. Imagination was busy, however, and it was easy to picture it 
out in its ancient magnificence, as it was when He, whose feet trod these 
very paths, lived and taught within it. 

The sublime and the ridiculous lie very close together. Our meditations 
were disturbed by the performances of a crowd of pilgrims near us. They 
too had pressed on to catch the first glimpse of the Holy City. They were 
a curious set — men, women and children. Every man had a donkey, but 
not every man rode his beast. This seemed reserved for the women and 
children. And the method of loading the animals was curious. Over tbe 
back of the creature was slung what looked like an enormous pair of saddle- 
bags. In one side the wife and mother curled herself up, while half a dozen 
children, more or less, big or little, were thrown in on the other side, as a 
makeweight to balance her. Imagine the scene, when every man. woman 
and child was alive with excitement, and each wanted to be first in bowing 
the knees at first sight of the city, and crying out "'El Khuds ! El Khuds ! " 
"the Holy, the Holy!" Such a tumbling bead over heels out of saddle- 
bags, and such an indiscriminate mess of children, women, men and donkeys, 
alas! I shall never see again. And what had all these pilgrims come for? 
Most of them had come to spend Holy Week, and to attend the ceremonies in 
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. What these were, we understood better 
a few days afterwards, when we wituessed them ourselves. On the evening 
of Good Friday, the church was filled with an ignorant and fanatical crowd, 
whom even the guard of Turkish soldiers could scarcely keep in order. An 
image of the Savior, half the size of life, a shriveled, shrunken, puny figure 
of wax, was nailed to a cross, exposed, carried in procession, taken from the 
cross, anointed and laid in the sepulchre, in presence of a dense multitude 
of noisy fanatics, who worshiped it as a fetich is worshiped in the south 
of Africa. The whole performance was a sickening one, and all that was 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE BAST. 479 

Impressive about it was the singing of a company of monks and the responses 
of a choir of boys. It was the grand, solemn chant of an Italian composer, 
the pathos of which not even the grating voices nor the stupid indifference 
of the singers could entirely obscure. 

One soon gets enough of holy places at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. 
Must of them are evidently mere figments of the imagination. It was more 
convenient for the monks who showed them to have them close together, 
and so, they have put them close together. It was better for their pockets 
to have many of them for which to charge an admission-fee, and so, many of 
them were invented. They not only show the sepulchre where Christ was 
laid, but the spot of the Crucifixion and the holes in the rock into which the 
three crosses were thrust that day. And yet the whole Chapel where these 
are shown is an upper chamber, standing on no rock at all! A little further 
on you see the Chapel of Adam, where the monks say his skull first leaped 
out of the earth ; then the tomb of Melchisedek ; and again, the very spot 
where the cock stood when he crowed to Peter. A little experience in the 
hands of the monks convinces you that the less confidence you put in their 
stories, the more apt you will be to learn the truth. Our religion gives little 
heed to special places, and it is a merciful ordering of God that none of the 
spots where the great events of Jesus' life occurred can be certainly identi- 
fied, for the history of Palestine abundantly demonstrates that, if they could 
be certainly identified, they would just as certainly be the objects of idola- 
trous worship. The object of a journey to Palestine is not to identify these 
sites, but rather to fix in mind the general features of the land and the char- 
acter of its scenery. The hills about Jerusalem, and those on which the city 
is built, remain just as they were, and though there is at first a feeling of 
disappointment at the wretchedness and misery that now meet your eye on 
every side, and especially at the lying and superstition of those who inhabit 
this once favored land, still the great events of Scripture all fit wonderfully 
into the scenes before your eyes, and you leave the country more thoroughly 
convinced of the truth of the Bible, and with far more vivid conceptions of 
its narratives, than you could possibly have had before you came. 

After a few days' sojourn in the City, we went through the Wilderness of 
Judea to the Jordan and the Dead Sea. The hills and valleys where John 
preached and Christ was tempted are melancholy wastes. Scarcely a blade 
of grass grows upon them, and the bronze-colored mountain-sides reflect 
upon you with tenfold heat the rays of a burning sun. Down, down we 
went, a long and desolate ride, till we stood by the ruins of Jericho, and 
drank of the brook which the prophet healed. There we encamped for the 
night, near a large party of pilgrims who had come to wash in the Jordan. 
Long before light next morning we set off for the river, and an hour after 
our arrival at the narrow, rushing stream, the pilgrims came trooping after 
us. Then followed a scene that baffles all description. Men, women and 
children, draped and undraped, rushed to the water to plunge themselves 
three times beneath the surface. Many were clad in the grave-clothes which 
they had purchased long before the time, and had come to consecrate by a 
wetting in the Jordan. Fathers ducked their wives and children, while the 
wives shrieked fearfully and the children yelled. All was excitement and 
confusion, and a source of no small amusement to the hoicadji who was 



4.S0 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 

looking on. By and by the sun rose, and we poshed on over the level, sandy 
plain to the Dead Sea. The landscape about it was deathlike. The sea was 
motionless. Complete silence reigned. Not a living thing, beast or bird or 
fish, was visible. The mountains rose steep, bare and yellow, from both 
sides, and when the sun got high, the whole region was hot as a furnace. 
The water was more bitter and disgusting to the taste than one can previ- 
ously conceive. Sea-water is very palatable compared with it. On the shore 
we sat down and breakfasted, after six hours riding, and then prepared to 
ascend the mountains to Mar Saba, on our way back to Jerusalem. 

All that day we rode under a scorching sun, over a succession of yellow 
hills, whose leafless desolation was like death itself — a horrible country. 
Bare cliffs of rock alternated with rounded hills, covered thick with yellow 
stones. No sign of water or life — not a blade of grass, not a breath of air, 
— only a stagnant atmosphere seven times heated. Our horses grew faint, 
and we grew sick, long before we reached our camping-place. Yet all day 
long our Arab guards seemed strangely frightened. Now and then we saw 
straggling Bedouin posted on the heights above our road, and these, they 
told us, were spies. We saw no cause for alarm, however, until after we 
reached our camping-place at the bottom of a deep valley, and dusk came 
on. Then we saw numbers of Bedouin horsemen filing along on the edges 
of the hills far above us. Our muleteers had taken off the horses and mules 
to a spring, some distance up the side of one of the hills, in order to give 
them water. Suddenly, as evening came on, we heard numerous reports 
of guns in that direction, and saw frequent flashes through the darkness. A 
man comes flying to the camp with the intelligence that a large party of 
Bedouin have seized upon our mules and horses, and have run away with 
them to the mountains. The menservants catch up all the arms they can 
lay hands on, and rush off up the hill to help their comrades. The gentle- 
men are requested to get their pistols ready in case of emergency. Soon 
flashes and reports again on the hills— here a flash and there a flash, bang ! 
bang ! — till the hill-side seems to be the scene of quite a battle. All of a sud- 
den our dragomen gallops into the camp in a state of the wildest excite- 
ment, exclaiming that the Bedouin have beaten our muleteers, and that 
there is great danger of their making a descent upon us in the camp. 
"Ladies to the tents!" and in an instant, having obtained a supply of am- 
munition, our heroic commander gallops off again into the darkness. The 
half dozen ladies crouch together in one of the tents, in no very peaceful 
state of mind, while the gentlemen of the party exert themselves to calm 
them, and at the same time load all the guns and revolvers within reach. 
While this is going on, one of them shoots himself accidentally through 
the hand. Then the ladies in the presence of real suffering come to their 
senses, and, while the doctor extracts the ball, they lend all their aid and 
sympathy. A muleteer comes in with his head broken in with a stone, an- 
other with his hand fractured, another with a wound in his arm. The scene 
by this time becomes sufficiently exciting. The firing on the hills has not 
ceased, but it is not so frequent. A messenger soon comes to tell us that our 
men have fought most bravely, have recovered the animals, and are now lead- 
ing them back in safety to the camp. Nobody is killed, though some are 
slightly injured. 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 4S1 

It seems amusing to look back upon, and yet I should hardly care to pass 
that uiglit again. No one knew that the Bedouin would not come down 
upon us in the darkness. No oue could be certain that in their anger they 
would not fire into our tents from the rocks above us. Yet we stationed a 
strung guard, and all of us slept soundly. No attack was made, and we rose 
in the morning very thankful that all was safe. For several hours after 
starting from the night's camping ground we saw companies of Bedouin 
posted on the tops of the hills about us, but they did not dare to attack us. 
They looked ugly enough, however, with their Arab horses and their long 
guns. They were greatly superior to us in numbers, and, if they had been 
only a little less afraid of Frank arms, we might have had more trouble. As 
it was, their caution was very well advised, for we all had revolvers, and 
their long match-locks would have been almost worthless in a combat with 
foreigners. All this country through which we passed before we reached 
Jerusalem again is celebrated for the robberies and murders which have 
been perpetrated by the lawless Bedouin. In fact it has an ancient reputa- 
tion of this sort, for it was this very wilderness of Judea that the man 
whom the good Samaritan relieved, passed through, when he went down to 
Jericho and fell among thieves. 

On our way back to Jerusalem we visted Bethlehem. It is pleasant to 
find such places as Bethlehem and Nazareth, so far superior to the ordinary 
eastern towns in cleanliness and decency. The inhabitants of both are 
almost all Christians, and both are distinguished in Syria for the beauty of 
the women. The grotto of the nativity at Bethlehem, with its golden lamps 
and silken hangings, did not interest me half as much as the sight of the 
hillsides where David tended his father's flocks, and the shepherds saw the 
multitude of the heavenly host on the night that Christ was born. The 
grotto is probably an imposture, but the hills and valleys about are the same 
that we read of in most ancient story. That same evening we made our 
way northward, past the spot where Rachel died, and where her tomb now 
stands, until the Holy City lay spread out before us on the opposite heights. 
and we felt the truth of the Psalmist's words, "Beautiful for situation, the 
joy of the whole earth is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of 
the great King." Down the deep vale of Hinnom, and through the Valley 
of Jehoshaphat, — until we crossed over and pitched our tents for the night 
upon the Mount of Olives. 

Memorable evening ! It was the Mohammedan feast of Ramadan, and at 
the firing of the sunset gun, circlets of lamps were lit, upon the minarets of 
all the mosques, that shone through the growing darkness like crowns of 
glory. Beneath our feet was the sacred city, — where David reigned, and 
where Jesus taught. Somewhere in this lowly valley the Savior passed that 
last most bitter night of agony in the garden, — up that steep path he was 
taken to his trial, — on one of those mounds outside the walls he hung those 
six long hours, parched with thirst and quivering with intensest pain, under 
the blazing noon-day sun. Who could lie down to sleep without most solemn 
and grateful thoughts that night? And when the morning dawned and all 
the splendor of the great temple enclosure dawned upon us, who could help 
being half intoxicated with the imaginations of the hour? There, across the 
valley, was the place where the cloud of glory descended upon the temple, 
and Solomon dedicated to God the courts of the house of the Lord. The 
SI 



482 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 

great open area of these courts now occupies a space of fifteen hundred feet 
in length by a thousand feet in breadth, and contains thirty-four acres. The 
temple of God has given place to a Mohammedan mosque, but the broad 
courts are beautiful still. The massive and lofty walls, the mosaic pave- 
ments, alternating with plots of fresh, green grass, the dark olives, the taper- 
ing cypresses, the marble fountains, the broad, elevated platform encircled 
by airy arches, the richly carved pulpits and prayer-niches and miniature 
cupolas, the great mosque with its noble dome glittering with enameled 
tiles, in arabesques of rainbow-hues, the secluded, sacred air that seemed to 
belong to all, the white figures of veiled women stealing from one mass of 
foliage to another, the turbaned heads bowed low in prayer, — all this was 
deeply impressive. But what must it have been, when these enclosing walls 
were hid by triple rows of marble columns a hundred and twenty feet in 
height and a thousand feet in length, forming arched colonnades grander 
than those of the grandest cathedral of modern days ! What must it have 
been when, in place of this mosque, stood the magnificent structure of the 
temple, with its lofty portico towering above all the rest ! What must it have 
been, when a hundred thousand worshipers joined in the solemn chants of the 
sanctuary — a multitude whose voice was like the sound of many waters, and 
uhich furnished John in the Apocalypse with his imagery, when he described 
the worship of the temple on high ! Ah, Jerusalem is beautiful, but the beau- 
ty of the past has gone forever. Only in the heavenly Jerusalem, and in the 
song of the multitude that no man can number, will it ever be restored. 

But time wotild fail me to tell the whole. Jerusalem must be left behind 
us. Northward, past Mizpeh and Gibeon, through Bethel and Shiloh, to 
Jacob's well, and Sychar, a city of Samaria. Here, at the foot of Mount 
Ebal and Mount Gerizim, and between them both, we passed a quiet Sab- 
bath day. We joined in worship with a number of parties encamped near 
us. Before we left the place, we visited the small, plain, white-washed cham- 
ber which constitutes the Samaritan Synagogue, and gazed from a respectful 
distance upon the great roll containing the precious Samaritan Pentateuch, 
which, though not written, as they relate, by the grandson or great-grand- 
son of Aaron, may yet date back to the beginning of the Christian era. 
Then we clambered to the top of Gerizim, and inspected the pit and the 
stones where the passover-lambs are killed and roasted every spring, and 
where twelve men, in white surplices and turbans, representing the twelve 
tribes of Israel, still from year to year maintain the ancestral Samaritan 
worship. Then, descending, we made our way northward, by way of Samaria 
and Dothan, to Jezreel and Shunem, Nain and Endor, all situated at the 
east of that great plain of Megiddo or Esdraelon, which we saw three weeks 
before, in all its grandeur and desolation, from Mount Carmel. Thence we 
climbed the hill and stood In Nazareth, the scene of thirty years of Jesus' life. 

The appearance of the little town is very pleasing, with its dazzling white 
walls embosomed in a green framework of cactus-hedges, and of fig and 
olive trees. The House of the Virgin we were not able to see, because, as 
tradition relates, the sacred dwelling was carried off in the thirteenth century 
by angels, in order to prevent its desecration by the Moslems. This may be 
regarded as authentic, for during the Pontificate of Paul II, that infallible 
head of the Church, this miracle was solemnly confirmed and vouched for 
by the Papal See. For reasons which may be Imagined as well as they can 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EAST. 4S3 

be described, we neglected to visit the workshop of Joseph, although the 
sight was offered us at so low a price as three piastres. But two things we 
did see which were much better worth seeing, — first, the spring outside the 
village, with its many maidens drawing water, much as Laban's daughters 
did of old ; and, secondly, the hill to the southwest of the town which, from 
a height of eighteen hundred feet, commands a lovely view of the vale of 
Nazareth, together with the distant prospect of Carmel and the great, wide 
sea beyond. To this spring where the women gathered, Mary the Virgin 
must have often led the steps of her infant Son, and from that summit the 
youthful Jesus must often have looked off toward the horizon which marked 
for him the farthest limit of the visible world, while he pondered upon the 
work for the world's deliverance, which even then began to spread out like 
this grand panorama before him. 

From Nazareth we passed on to Mount Tabor and the Lake of Galilee, 
and past the ruins of the cities on which the curse of Jesus rested because 
they repented not. Then to Safed, Caesarea-Philippl, and Damascus. And 
with Damascus we must close our journey. It is a fitting close. The famous 
view of Damascus, from the ridge north of the city, has been celebrated by 
every traveler, yet it has never been praised .enough. It is the most beauti- 
ful vision that strikes the eye of the traveler in the east. The plain of 
Damascus is covered with foliage, as far as the eye can reach. The endless 
orchards of fig, pomegranate, mulberry, almond, apricot, orange and olive, 
form an unbroken sea of green, that surrounds the city and washes its very 
walls. The minarets and domes of Damascus rise in slender and swelling 
beauty from the midst of the green, and no language can do justice to the 
exquisite contrast between the white spires and the verdure that surrounds 
them. This plain of waving leaves is bounded by high and barren moun- 
tains. The snowy crest of goodly Hermon, and its subject hills, fill all the 
north and west. It is a legend of the Moslems that Mohammed, the prophet, 
never entered Damascus, exclaiming as he passed by, ''Man can have but 
one Paradise,— I will not take mine on earth." Alas, that the beauty of the 
outside show is so belied by squalor and wretchedness within ! But so it is 
with all the land of Palestine. The prospect often pleases, — and only man 
is vile. Neither Damascus nor Jerusalem can satisfy. And there was no 
lesson that I learned in the Holy Land, more impressive and lasting than 
this: There is no earthly city, however famed in story or sacred from asso- 
ciations of the past, where the soul can rest and say, Here I will abide, here 
I will dwell forever. If we would find rest, it must be, not in the earthly 
but in the heavenly Canaan, not in the Holy City where prophets spake and 
Jesus walked while here in mortal flesh, but only in that city which hath 
foundations, whose builder and maker is God. It was only this common 
feeling of us all that the old mediaeval poet expressed, in those most sweet 
and sacred lines: 

" O, mother dear, Jerusalem ! 
When shall I come to thee? 
When shall my sorrows have an end? 
Thy joys when shall I see? 

" O, happy harbor of God's saints ! 
O, sweet and pleasant soil ! 
In thee no sorrow can be found. 
Nor grief, nor pain, nor toil ! '* 



XLVII. 
THE CRUSADES* 

The subject of this paper illustrates the powerful effects of the law of 
association. Important events invest the spots where they occur with a 
peculiar sacredness. This is true not only in individual experience, but in 
general history. The principle has special application to religion. Every 
great religion has attracted popular devotion to its birthplace or its shrines, 
its ritual or its pilgrimages. Even Christianity is not without its holy 
places ; for the very reason that it is a historical religion, as distinguished 
from a system of priestly ceremonial or of abstract doctrine, it bestows upon 
these holy places a genuine and a reasonable regard ; the places are helps 
to its influence and verifications of its truth. The Jew looked with affec- 
tion to the city where David built his capital upon the rugged heights of 
Zion, and the Christian looks with an equal though a different interest to 
that ether hill where the Son of David was crucified and buried. 

Christianity, however, differs from other religions, in that it is preemi- 
nently the religion of the Spirit. It accepts the help of the outward and 
visible so far as these can minister to inward devotion, but it counts these 
idolatry when they usurp the thought and worship that belong to God. It 
has felt at every step of its history the common tendency of human 
nature to exalt the means above the end, the form above the substance. 
And there have been whole generations in which the religion of Christen- 
dom, so-called, has well-nigh fallen back to the plane of the earthly and 
material. There were two hundred years of the middle age, when the 
church forgot her living Lord in her jealousy for the possession of his sepul- 
chre. As Hegel has well expressed it in his Philosophy of History, "She 
sought the truth of spirit in a tomb ; she was met by the old words : Why 
seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here but is risen!" This 
mighty movement and culmination of an externalized Christianity we call 
the Crusades. My purpose is briefly to review the occasions, causes and 
results of the Crusades, with special reference to ecclesiastical history and 
to European civilization. 

In the eleventh century pilgrimage was a thing of ancient date. It had 
begun even under the heathen emperors. Though Titus had burned the 
temple at Jerusalem and drawn the ploughshare over its ashes, and though 
Hadrian had founded a pagan colony on Mount Zion and built a temple to 
Venus on the hill of Calvary. Christians even thus early found their way 
to the Holy City. The conversion of Constantine. and the royal progress 
of Helena, the mother of the emperor, with the breaking down of heathen 



An Essay read before The Club, Rochester, February 15. 1876. 

4^4 



THE CRUSADES. 483 

altars and the discovery of the Savior's tomb which followed, rendered pil- 
grimage both common and fashionable. Constantine erected the church of 
the Holy Sepulchre ; his mother marked the path of her pilgrimage by the 
churches which she built; it is only a natural result that we should possess, 
from a date so far back as the fourth century, an itinerary designed for the 
use of pilgrims from Bordeaux, by way of Constantinople, to Jerusalem. 

The more sagacious and spiritual Fathers of the church, such as Gregory 
of Nyssa, Augustine and Jerome, protested against these pilgrimages as 
needless and dangerous. But the tide soon became too strong for resist- 
ance. The number who set out for the east continually increased. Hos- 
pitals were founded for the refreshment and care of the pilgrims. They 
were exempted from tolls and taxes. The staff and wallet, the scallop-shell 
upon the hat, from the shore of the Mediterranean, and the palm-branch 
from Jericho in the hand, became insignia of a lower order of nobility, to 
which the poor as well as the rich might aspire. Not only were there 
rewards at the hands of men. The journey to Palestine became a work of 
merit which availed with God. In connection with the growing faith in 
works of supererogation, thousands persuaded themselves that bathing in 
the Jordan was a baptism which washed away all sins, and that the shirt 
in which they entered the Holy City, if only preserved for a winding-sheet, 
would in the last great day ensure them a blessed resurrection. 

In the year G37, only five years after Mohammed's death, the wave of Sar- 
acenic invasion under the Caliph Omar swept over Syria and Egypt, and for 
a century thereafter it rolled onward almost without a check. But almost 
the last great act of the undivided Roman Empire was the repulse of the 
Moslems from Constantinople in 718 by sturdy Leo, the Emperor of the East. 
But for this staggering blow, and that other crushing defeat which they suf- 
fered at the hands of Charles Martel a little later at Tours (732), the Sar- 
acens might have descended upon Christendom while her social and gov- 
ernmental institutions were yet unformed, and we might be the heirs of an 
Asiatic instead of a European civilization. When the empire was actually 
divided, and Charlemagne united the western lands, the crisis of Saracen 
fury and ambition had passed. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, not wholly inter- 
rupted by the recent wars, began anew and with redoubled enthusiasm. 
The very hazards of an expedition to a foreign land and among the infidels 
stimulated the imagination. The holy places of the Christian were holy 
places of the Moslem also. Though hatred of the western image-worship 
was difficult to conceal, Saracen thrift seemed to get the better of Saracen 
bigotry. Or, did the Moslems learn courtesy from their Caliph Haroun al 
Raschid, who assured all Franks of safety, and in token thereof sent to 
Charlemagne the keys of the church of the Holy Sepulchre? Whatever 
may be the explanation, it is certain that the great. Charles helped on the 
growing tendency of the times by proclaiming in the eighth century that 
throughout his whole realm pilgrims to Palestine should be gratuitously 
provided for, at least to the extent of lodging, fire and water. 

No proper estimate of the events that followed can be formed, without 
taking into account the traditional hold which pilgrimage had come to have 
upon people of every class, the almost unobstructed freedom of it from the 
first to the tenth centuries, and the sacrilege which seemed involved in 



4S6 THE CRUSADES. 

every attempt to prevent or hinder it. There were indeed occasional out- 
bursts of Saracen insolence from the time of the Fatimite Caliphs, descend- 
ants of Fatima, daughter and only child of Mohammed, in 972. But it was 
not until 1063 that the real persecution of pilgrims began. In that year the 
Seljuks — for the Turks proper did not appear until the thirteenth century — 
pressed down upon the empire of the Saracens, as the Teutonic tribes had 
pressed down upon old Rome, — though Fiudlay tells us that they did not 
take Jerusalem till 1076. They were half heathen and utterly barbarous. 
They had embraced Mohammedanism in its bigotry and its warlike spirit, 
but they had not yet imbibed the Mohammedan civilization. In one vast 
horde they poured in from the east and north, overran all Palestine, put an 
end to the Saracen dominion in Syria, and threatened the very existence of 
the Eastern Empire at Constantinople. They scorned the Christians, whom 
they knew only from the degraded Syrians and Greeks, and from the dust- 
stained pilgrims who thronged the roads to Jerusalem. Then came the first 
real and protracted suffering. The unsettled and despotic nature of the Turk- 
ish rule, the barbarity of Turkish manuers, the extortions, robberies and out- 
rages perpetrated either by fanatical zeal or by native cruelty upon Chris- 
tians of both sexes and of every European laud, were deeper wrongs than 
had been suffered by the church since the persecutions of the Pagan Em- 
perors. These were the more intolerable and roused the deeper indignation 
throughout the west, from the fact that the idea of the outward unity of 
the church, and its supreme authority over all earthly powers, had nearly 
reached its final height, — or, to put it in fewer words, it was the time of the 
great Hildebrand, known to history as Pope Gregory the Seventh. 

Yet Hildebrand was not the leader of the movement which followed. Let 
us appreciate his position. He did not underestimate the danger of this 
new onset of barbarism. The swift advances of the Turkish power excited 
his grave apprehensions. Nor was the project of a united movement 
against the infidels a new one to him. A century before, the indignities 
put upon pilgrims by the Fatimite Caliphs had led Gerbert, Archbishop of 
Ravenna, to write an address in the name of the church of Jerusalem, exhort- 
ing all Christians to take arms for its rescue. Even thus early the Pisans 
had sent out a fleet and had invaded Syria with such effect that, for a little 
time, the Saracens supposed all Christendom was arming against them. Ami 
now the Byzantine emperor, fearing an attack of the Turks upon his capital, 
sent an embassy to Gregory, entreating his assistance. Gregory entered into 
the plan. With the two-fold aim of driving back the Turks and of bring- 
ing the Eastern Empire into the Latin fold, he addressed the rulers of the 
European states, urging a common war upon the Turks, and foreshadowing 
the Crusades. He showed that the Eastern Empire was but a feeble barrier 
against the infidel and barbarian enemy, and that if the west did not go to 
the east, the east would come to the west. 

But the civil powers of Europe had learned to be suspicious of Gregory's 
uncompromising logic. They feared that the rousing of Europe against 
Asia might be only another scheme for enlarging and centralizing the papal 
power. They refused to second his plans, and thus in all probability was 
prevented that complete swallowing up of Europe in the Papacy, which 
would have resulted if the Crusades had been under the control of the great 



THE CRUSADES. 487 

Hildebrand. Great revolutions break out from below. Rulers may guide 
them ; they cauuot originate them ; they can seldom precipitate them. And 
Gregory found it so. Though the struggle with regard to the investitures 
was over, and Henry the Fourth had done his three days' penance in the 
winter's cold at Gregory's gate, and the Holy Roman Empire had well-nigh 
yielded its claim of independent sovereignty to the Holy Roman Church, 
yet all the power of the Pope was inadequate to the stirring up of practical 
interest in the proposed undertaking — a practical interest which, when 
kindled twenty years later among the people, swept over all Europe like a 
prairie lire in the drought of summer. 

Thus forty years passed after the Seljuk conquest of Palestine, before 
any general effort was made to rescue Christ's sepulchre from the infidels, 
or to renew the conflict between two great religions, which had ceased four 
centuries before. But, during those forty years, every city and castle in 
Europe had received back its maltreated pilgrims, some of them maimed and 
just escaped with life, and all of them narrating their sufferings with the 
fervor of personal experience. In the preaching of these pilgrims we must 
find the immediate occasion of the Crusades. Foremost among them was 
Peter of Pieardy. A youth of fiery spirit, he had been bred to the profes- 
sion of arms. But he left the sword for the crucifix, and a high-born wife 
for what in less stirring times might have been called a passionless bride, 
the Church. In a secluded hermitage he buried himself from the world. 
Self-mortification and intense meditation wrought their natural effects upon 
an ardent and imaginative nature. Christ himself, as he believed, appeared 
to him in visions. He talked familiarly with the holy apostles. A letter 
from heaven fell at his feet. He made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, yet 
more aroused by the sufferings and outrages which he observed and experi- 
enced, he solemnly announced to the Patriarch of Jerusalem that he was 
commissioned by God to rouse the western nations to drive out the infidel 
oppressors. 

Returning to Europe, Peter brought letters from the Patriarch to Urban 
II, the successor and imitator of Hildebrand. His recitals were received 
with tears. His general scheme was sanctioned, and he was sent, as special 
envoy of the Papal See, to preach the deliverance of the Holy Land through 
all the countries of Europe: Urban seconded his efforts with the utmost 
vigor. The Council of Piacenza united the Italians ; the Council of Cler- 
mont, in France, united the Transalpine peoples. At this latter gathering, 
after the Byzantine ambassadors had pleaded their country's cause and 
Peter had electrified the people by his eloquence, the Pope himself addressed 
the multitude. As he spoke, the thirty thousand laymen followed his adju- 
rations with the shout, "Deus vult ! " — and "Deus vult ! " became the 
watchword of the holy wars. Each bishop hastened from the Council to his 
diocese, and roused his flock. Thus the cry ''Deus vult!" spread from 
Clermont, in Auvergne, to every quarter of Europe, and, seized with sudden 
frenzy, all other business neglected, men of every nation and of every class 
sewed red crosses upon their shoulders and took arms to deliver Jerusalem. 
And so, in the years 1096 and 1097, the first Crusade began. 

It would be impossible to give even a meagre sketch of the incidents and 
actors in these wars. And general description here is more intelligible aud 



4S3 THE CRUSADES. 

impressive than detail. To tell the story in few words, six millions of all 
classes, first and last, assumed the cross and vowed to go to Palestine. 
According to contemporary writers, six hundred thousand perished in the 
flrst Crusade, and historians variously estimate that from two millions to 
four millions was the total loss of life in the long conflict. And even the 
largest of these numbers will not seem impossible when we consider how 
these worse than useless hosts vrere composed. Some of the armies com- 
prised the very offscouring of Europe — very savages for ignorance and vice. 
The three hundred thousand whom the more shrewd leaders sent out under 
Peter the Hermit, asked, in their simplicity, if the nearest village to their 
homes were Jerusalem, the end of their wanderings. The nor I hern forests 
sent forth hordes whom the Arabian chroniclers call an iron race, of gi- 
gantic stature, who darted fire from their eyes and spat blood upon the 
ground. Alas, that all were not such as the Arabian chronicles described ! 
It was sacrilege to deter any from so holy a service. Women enlisted, and 
from the Rhine came a troop of Amazons under "the golden-footed dame." 
A regiment of boys, armed with cross-bows, made show of fight at Antioch. 
There was a Crusade of the Children, and thousands of weaklings who should 
have been in mothers' arms, after crossing the Alps in the depths of winter, 
were either shipwrecked in the Mediterranean or captured and sold for 
slaves. Thus the armies were a heterogeneous conglomeration of all races, 
languages, sexes and ages, without unity of plan or discipline or generalship. 
It is no wonder that they whitened every road to Palestine with their 
skeletons, and drenched the Holy Land with their blood. 

Yet there were great leaders — men valiant themselves, and able so to mar- 
shal their few brave and disciplined followers, as to rout and overthrow 
twenty times their number of Paynim foes. The magnanimous Godfrey ; the 
impetuous Robert, son of William the Conqueror; the cool and ambitious 
Bohemond ; Tancred, the hero of Tasso's epic ; the lion-hearted Richard of 
England, whose restless spirit of adventure Scott has so well described in 
Ivanhoe ; Saint Louis, the best of all the kings of France ; and Frederick 
Barbarossa, the earliest and noblest model of chivalry, as he is the greatest 
of the Crusaders — all these were mighty captains during the two centuries. 
Godfrey captured Jerusalem and built up a frost-work kingdom. Frederick 
II, the grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, excommunicated though he was, 
put the same crown upon his head in the next century. Baldwin seated 
himself upon the throne of the old capital of Constantine. A few got glory, 
but the best of them won only disease and death. 

And yet these expeditions did not die out upon experience of the flrst dis- 
asters. From the same defeats seemed to rise the same enthusiasm. Gen- 
eration after generation took the sword to perish in the same way. The 
eight Crusades were only more marked instances of what occurred every year 
of the two crusading centuries. Every summer saw its armed bands set out 
for Palestine, — priests and people blessing them as they departed from their 
homes, and accompanying them a little distance on their way. The great 
Crusades were hut exaggerations of these annual expeditions, occasioned by 
some great calamity at home which demanded penance, or some great reverse 
abroad which necessitated reinforcements. And so the West was kept in 
continual commotion, from the first Crusade, when, in the words of the 



THE CRUSADES. 489 

eastern princess, all Europe seemed loosed from its foundations and hurled 
upon Asia, to the last Crusade, when the good King Louis — Louis IX, of 
France— after wearing the red cross for twenty years, died of the pestilence 
in Africa. Yet long before these two centuries, with their migration of na- 
tions, had expired, the Christians were driven from every Syrian stronghold, 
the two kingdoms they had founded were annihilated, and the Turks held 
again in peace the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And thus the only enter- 
prise in which all the western states engaged with equal ardor — an enter- 
prise which was certainly the heroic event of modern Europe, uniting its 
various peoples into one, as did the siege of Troy the Greeks — an enterprise, 
too, in which Europe was first known as Europe, and in which European 
states first appeared as single states in history — this enterprise, in its 
immediate aim and conduct, must certainly be regarded as the most signal 
monument of human folly that has appeared in any age of human history. 
With Voltaire, we may call it a joint product of barbarism, ignorance and 
fanaticism. ^ith Milman, we may describe it as the most wonderful 
phrensy that ever possessed mankind. 

But it does not become us to rest content with an estimate like this. Such 
an estimate regards the vast movement only in its superficial aspects. Con- 
sidered in the higher light of a necessary result and outlet of imprisoned 
forces, which were then exercised and improved for worthier tasks than the 
building up of Syrian kingdoms or the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, 
the Crusades are instinct with new principles and pregnant with consequences 
the most beneficent and sublime. Let us carefully distinguish between the 
causes of these wars, and their mere occasions or concomitants. It is very 
plain that the preaching of Peter the Hermit was in no proper sense the 
cause of the Crusades. The real cause was that hidden train that had been 
silently laid in the mind of Europe, and whose very existence was unknown 
until Peter's words put to it the torch. The kings of Europe were not the 
cause of the Crusades. They took no share in the first Crusade. They fol- 
lowed the great popular impulse, only when they found it irresistible. The 
leaden of the hosts were not the cause of the Crusades. They did not at 
first originate them, nor could they stop the movement when it had once 
begun, — for it had a deeper root than the wish to gain the kingdoms for 
Christian leaders, or to gratify the fantastic and adventurous whims of 
princes. It was like the rising of an ocean-flood, spontaneous, overwhelm- 
ing, either bearing all obstacles upon its bosom or drowning them forever. 
From the beginning to the end the Crusades were essentially popular in 
their character ; and they demonstrate, if demonstration were needed, that 
the millions are moved, not by climate, not by government, not by individ- 
ual leaders, not by material interests, but primarily by ideas, and that, for 
an idea, a whole nation or a whole hemisphere may live and die. There was 
an idea that possessed the mind of Europe, and that explains the Crusades. 
Can history, or the philosophy of history, compel this subtle but mighty 
spirit to take form before us and announce its name? 

Guizot has reduced the various influences which determined the Crusades 
to two great classes, the social and the moral. He claims that the social 
cause was the old barbarian taste for roving and for war. which, although 
confined for three centuries since the Empire of Charlemagne, had never 






490 THE CRUSADES. 

been extinguished. When the Empire which Charlemagne had founded was 
divided and scattered, in the hands of his successors, all the old restlessness 
revived. The barbaric spirit awoke from its lethargy. There came again a 
chaos of confusion and isolation. The military ambition, the haughty inde- 
pendence, the uncurbed license, the private wars of the barons, began anew. 
The open country was the scene of disorder and outrage. The only pursuits 
of the noble of that day were war and rapine. He was the same old pagan 
under a Christian guise. Sprinkling him with a holy broom had not altered 
his nature. When he was asked to fight in a foreign land for the tomb of 
Christ, the call appealed alike to his instinct of wandering and his instinct 
of battle. The sacrifices which his fathers had offered to Thor or to Woden 
seemed to him most proper to lay upon God's altar. The slaughter of the 
enemies of the faith in the distant East became the natural object of his 
religious zeal. 

Let us remember, also, that the individualism of mediaeval society was 
almost perfect. The feudal system fostered it. And feudalism was the union 
of the old Roman grants of land upon condition of military service, with the 
Teutonic fealty of the individual warrior to the leader whose fortunes he 
followed. But as yet the personal and Teutonic element was in the ascend- 
ant. There were a host of petty chiefs, each with his body of armed retain- 
ers, his castle and the huts of his vassals around it. The servant imitated 
the master. Only by valor could he rise. And war was needed, as the oppor- 
tunity for valor. In war man was opposed to man, strength to strength. 
Gunpowder had not yet rendered personal prowess and might of arm of 
inferior account. Courage met its reward ; the squire might win knight- 
hood of his master, and the knight might win an eastern principality. 

For such habits of life, and for such warlike passions, what a field was 
opened on the plains of Asia ! What California was to the broken-down 
merchant of a quarter of a century ago, what Dante's terrestrial paradise at 
the antipodes of Jerusalem was to Christopher Columbus on his two last 
voyages westward, that Jerusalem itself was to the Crusader — a city where 
fallen fortunes might be raised again, or where ambition might carve its way 
to fabulous wealth and power. The knight need cramp his energies no 
longer In petty castle-warfare. His sphere of action widened boundlessly 
before him. Golden sceptres glittered in the distance. Diamonds and pal- 
aces, the spoils of Turkish Emirs, Grecian wines and women, tempted his 
curiosity and roused his imagination. Many a mind had visions by night 
and day of palaces of cedar, paved with jaspar and lined with gold. Every 
class of society felt the charm. The monk might escape the discipline of 
the convent, and as a member of the Church militant yield himself again to 
the pleasures of the world. The oppressed serf or citizen might gain free- 
dom from the tyrannical restrictions of his lord. To join a Crusado, the 
vassal might alienate his land without consent of his superior, and enjoy all 
the privileges of the ecclesiastic. The debtor might escape from his cred- 
itors, the outlaw brave the law, yet be free from punishment, not only for 
all past, but for all future transgressions. Guy of Lusignan fled from 
France a murderer, and was raised to the throne of Jerusalem. 

Yet it is evident that all these social influences were only of secondary 
account. They acted with energy only after the spread of some common 



THE CRUSADES. 4'J1 

idea, which could unite them with itself and take a coloring from them. Such 
narrow and selfish interests alone could never have roused or united Europe. 
The love of war and the barbaric desire of roving cannot be said to have 
Inspired all the European classes. This cause was most potent among the 
feudal nobility. Over vast multitudes it had but little influence. The serfs, 
the artisans, monks, citizens, women and youth, in fact, all the more timid 
and peaceful classes, were impelled by a far different desire, were animated 
by a feeling which passed the bounds of ordinary selfishness, and proceeded 
from deeper springs than the love of war and the curiosity of the traveler. 
A mere glance at the composition of the hosts that perished on every Hun- 
garian road and on every Turkish plain puts this beyond all doubt. We 
are driven to the conclusion that, underlying all private interests and all 
social influences, there was a moral or religious cause, and it is only when we 
recognize this, that we can account for the marvelous facts of the history. 

This cause was not by any means the papal influence. This is evident* 
from the fact already alluded to, that even Gregory the Great, a pope of 
vastly more ability than Urban, was utterly unable to rouse the European 
princes, the very class over whom the social inducements had greatest 
power, although he summoned them to arms at the very crisis of danger, 
upon the first onset of the Turks and amid the first alarm of Europe. And 
now for forty years the Turks had held secure possession of Jerusalem, 
and every year their treatment of Christian pilgrims grew less severe. There 
was but a single circumstance that seemed to promise greater success to 
Urban than to Hildebrand, and that was a division of the Mohammedan pow- 
er between the Sultan of Bagdad and the Sultan of Asia Minor. And yet, 
in this time of peace and of immeasurably slighter provocation than that of 
twenty years before, the announcement of Peter's plans, and Urban's sanc- 
tion of them, fired all Europe. In the last years of the Crusades, again, 
when the danger was greater than ever before, when the Turks were most 
united, powerful and threatening, when every Christian had been driven 
from Syria, when means of transport and the art of war were far better 
known than in the earlier Crusades, all the authority of the Popes, aided by 
royal influence, could not raise even the shadow of an army against an enemy 
now almost at their doors. These facts are explicable only upon the admis- 
sion that the people, aud not the popes, were the real movers in the Crusades. 

Guizot has stated the moral cause to be the impulse of religious feeling 
and belief, and he calls the Crusades the crisis of the conflict which had been 
raging for four hundred years between two hostile religions. And Stanley, 
in his History of the Eastern Church, tells us that the Crusades owed their 
origin entirely to the conflict with Islam. There is a sense in which these 
utterances are true, but they are capable of leaving a radically false impres- 
sion. They leave the impression that these wars were essentially offensive, 
and prompted by hatred of false religion. It may be doubted whether any 
long or extensive war has been carried on by a people solely from such 
motives. The individual soldier, and the army in mass, risk life from posi- 
tive, not from negative motives ; not simply to wreak vengeance, but to gain 
advantage ; not simply to destroy, but to win. Hatred of the Turk was but 
the negative and subordinate side, a necessary incident in the accomplish- 
ment of a positive aim. That the Crusades cannot be explained as a merely 



492 THE CRUSADES. 

natural crisis of long cherished religious hostility, which had been growing 
in the mind of Europe for centuries, seems clear from the fact that the 
causes for this hostility were not nearly so great at this time, as they had 
been thirty or forty years before. Just forty years before Peter's preaching 
— about 10G4, as Findlay tells us — a pilgrimage was undertaken by certain 
German bishops with a retinue of seven thousand persons, and three fourths 
of this number perished from suffering and the sword. Christianity had 
overcome Mohammedanism in Europe four centuries before. Then, in 
reality, the question of precedence had been decided between the two rival 
religions ; and it seems incredible that, after four centuries of peace, the 
hostility that remained should have ripened naturally, under no peculiarly 
favoring circumstances, into an intensity of hatred so universal and so stu- 
pendous in its results. 

No, it was a new feeling, a hitherto unthought of impulse, which absorbed 
"this hostility into itself and used it for its purpose. The struggle which 
followed was a religious struggle, not simply in the sense of war to the death 
against falsehood, but in the sense of war to the death for what was con- 
ceived to be positive truth. We assert that a universal awakening of relig- 
ious feeling, and of religious feeling that had in it an element of truth, was 
the moving cause of the Crusades, and that a great part of this feeling was 
earnest and genuine. We cannot define this universal sentiment in any 
terms which would imply that it was predominantly sensual or selfish. We 
cannot attribute the sudden rising of Europe to the special indulgences 
which were now for the first time granted. These had their influence, but 
when we search for the main cause of these wars, we may almost disregard 
them. There were two classes of Crusaders — those who went from utterly 
selfish motives, and those who were animated by a purer spirit. There were 
those of the first class — "moderate sinners," as Gibbon calls them, who had 
already incurred a debt of three hundred years of penance — a debt which, 
under ordinary circumstances, neither their lives nor their fortunes could 
pay. These were under absolute subjection to the priests, and the remission 
of all past penance and indulgence for all future sin were surely worth a 
journey to Palestine. "God," says the Abbot Guibert, "invented the 
Crusades, as a new way for the laity to atone for their sins and to merit 
salvation." 

But, after all, the majority of Crusaders were possessed by a higher impulse 
than this. The " Deus vult ! " which followed the speech of Urban, had in it 
a real significance. It was an imaginative and curious age. God was believed 
to interfere in the affairs of men. Political affairs were governed, not so 
much by considerations of state-craft, as by theological considerations. 
Anxieties about the balance of power in Europe would have been an anach- 
ronism. And the great idea of the Middle Ages was the idea of the external 
unity and supreme authority of the Church. The traditions of the Roman 
Empire had descended to Hildebrand and to Innocent III, as well as to 
Henry IV and to Frederick II, and of these the Church and not the 
State was at this time the world-conquering and world-ruling power. It was 
an idea which could take possession of prince and people alike. National 
animosities and royal jealousies yielded to its influence. A kingdom of 
Christ on earth, before which serf and emperor alike should how. and under 






THE CRUSADES. 493 

whose shadow the nations should rest secure — this was the dream of the 
time. And this kingdom was to be a literal and visible kingdom of Christ 
himself. Far and wide over Europe was spread the idea that the thousand 
years of prophecy were nearly accomplished, and that the great dragon was 
to be loosed. Christ was to judge the earth in Palestine, and all true fol- 
lowers should meet him there. Charters granted at that period begin with 
the words: " Appropinquante mundi termino." Many were the saints who, 
before the Crusades broke out, had abandoned all and fled to Palestine. 
What extravagance could be deemed impossible when the general rising 
once began ! The great design of delivering the Holy Sepulchre, already 
all-important in the mind of Christendom, gained at once a novel and sur- 
prising power. The whole system of sensuous worship culminated in the 
worship of the Holy Sepulchre, and to meet Christ in the Holy City, after 
having delivered his tomb from the sacrilege of infidel possession, was the 
highest ambition of millions. 

Thus a general belief in an express and direct command of God, an 
unhesitating conviction of the sole right of the Church to world-wide sway, 
and an identification of that sway with the possession of Christ's tomb in 
Palestine, were the sources of a religious enthusiasm, such as the world has 
never seen before or since. All other causes were as nothing compared with 
this generous and uncalculating zeal for the outward dominion of Christ and 
his Church. No one can see the hosts of Crusaders led on by ignorant 
monks, or by men taken from the rabble, through German forests and 
Byzautian plains, falling by hundreds at every step, yet pressing on through 
famine and pestilence and death, refusing to halt after their toils in the soft 
Phrygian vales, refusing to assist their leaders in any scheme of conquest 
but the conquest of Jerusalem, yet half a million of them perishing before 
they got to Antioch, — no one, I say, can look upon this spectacle and not 
believe that there was one feeling that united them, and that this feeling 
was a deep though misplaced religious ardor. These most disastrous yet 
most unselfish of wars, as Lecky calls them, were due to an intense religious 
enthusiasm— an enthusiasm which for two hundred years rose again and 
again, fresh and ardent, from utter and hopeless defeat. How great the 
problem is, may be judged from the following significant words of Michaud, 
the modern historian of the Crusades. "'No power on earth," he says, 
"could have been able to produce such a revolution. It belongs only to 
Him whose will marshals and disperses tempests, to throw all at once into 
human hearts that enthusiasm which silenced all other passions, and drew 
on the multitude as by an invisible power." What Michaud would seem to 
relegate to the category of miracle, we prefer to call Providence and the 
working of second causes, and our final word of explanation is this : The 
Crusades were the climax of a vast popular movement towards the sensuous 
and external in Christianity ; a movement which the Popes guided, but did 
not originate ; a movement which had power, because whole ages thought it 
to be in the interests of Christ ; a movement which, in its utter defeat, gave 
useful demonstration to all after ages that Christ's words were true: "My 
kingdom is not of this world." 

In passing to consider the effects of the Crusades, we shall find it needful 
to distinguish between the immediate and the more remote. Of the formei. 



494 THE CRUSADES. 

I have spoken of but ore — the short-lived conquests in the East. They were 
short-lived for many reasons. The Turks had learned much of the art of war 
from their Christian invaders, and were increasingly prepared to repel at- 
tack. Let us add to this the diminished interest of the West in the Crusades 
themselves. Without proper reinforcements, the Franks wasted away, till 
the whole army of the King of Jerusalem consisted of less than six thousand 
men, and of this number, according to William of Tyre, less than a thou- 
sand were mounted knights. Luxury and an enervating climate, together 
with habits of unbridled license, enfeebled the Latins. To their weakness 
the Turks at last opposed the solid union of all the Mohammedan principali- 
ties under a single chief. The hearts of the Crusaders sank within them. 
In the first Crusade, the patron saints of each nation were seen in the van 
of battle, as the Greeks at Marathon saw Theseus with his mighty brazen 
club leading on the charge. But these wonders grew less frequent, and as 
imagination gave place to reason, the Latins shed no tears on resigning tlie 
keys of the Holy Sepulchre again into the hands of the infidels. 

Another immediate effect of the Crusades was the outlet which it afforded 
to the lawless passions and unoccupied strength of feudalism. We are told 
by Gibbon, that the waste of life and treasure was an uncompensated loss to 
the world. It remains for Gibbon, if he would maintain his thesis, to show, 
what is contrary to all the evidence, namely, that feudalism was not verging 
upon a state of utter anarchy, in which the overboiling spirit that showed 
itself in desolation and outrage all over Europe, would without a seasonable 
outlet have blown to pieces the whole fabric of society. The lives lost in 
the East would almost beyond a doubt have otherwise been lost in intestine 
strife at home. We regard the Crusades therefore as a politic diversion to 
Asia of the tide of war, which else would have deluged the frontiers of the 
European kingdoms, and prevented the quiet growth of those institutions 
of modern times which were then in embryo. Or, to return to the former 
figure, we see in the Crusades from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries 
the very safety-valve of European civilization. 

Yet another great and immediate effect was the strengthening of the bar- 
rier against the Turks — a horde of barbarians far more rude and predatory 
than the original followers of the Prophet. It is indeed so certain that, but 
for the Crusades, the states of Europe would have fallen one by one into 
the hands of the advancing enemy, that Michaud has said that 'this is the 
first and greatest of all the benefits they have conferred upon humanity." 
Constantinople, the bulwark of the West, was on the point of falling. The 
Crusades saved the life of that capital for yet four hundred years. Within 
those four hundred years, Europe became civilized, and her arts and sciences 
came to be her sure and eternal defense against the infidels. The Crusades 
constructed a barrier against the Turks, — but the greatest barrier was, as 
Freeman has pointed out, not a barrier of arms, but a moral barrier. The 
principle was once, and once for all, established, that all Christian powers 
were natural allies against Mohammedan powers. In short, Europe appears 
as Europe, first in the Crusades. 

If we turn from the immediate results to those which are more remote, we 
find much greater difficulty in tracing, and as a natural result, much greater 
diversity of opinion with regard to them among historians. It is, indeed, 



THE CRUSADES. 495 

not yet a century, since the opinion of Hume and Gibbon seemed to be that 
the holy wars were simply a monument of human folly, without any rational 
and sufficient end. Of course, we can believe this of no single event, — 
much less of the great drama before us. Let us first inquire what were the 
results to the Church. Michaud divides the period of the Crusades into two 
parts, each of a hundred years. In the first of these, the Papal authority 
increased until it reached its final height. In the second, it again declined, 
until at the end of the two centuries it was smaller than it had been at the 
beginning. The truth is that it was not till the second Crusade that the 
Popes saw the power they might exert. The spirit of the Crusade sur- 
prised them, for they did not originate it. Striving then by all means to 
make themselves its masters, though they gained great power at first, the 
staff on which they leaned soon broke, and they fell even below their former 
authority. Some of the advantages which they gained were these. The 
Crusades from first to last were preached in their name. By leading, they 
secured general reverence. They became possessed of power, as the pro- 
tectors of the families of the absent crusaders. They assumed to dispense 
from all civil and religious penalties. They were made arbiters in all dis- 
putes between rival princes and kings. They marie the Crusades the pre- 
text for usurping in all the states of Europe the attributes of sovereignty. 
They levied armies and taxes for the holy wars. Their legates exercised 
supreme authority in their name. By an admirable legal fiction, the legate 
received by proxy the submission due to the master, and as if he were the 
Pope himself, had absolute command of the clergy, then the most influen- 
tial body in the state. Crusading vows were held in terrorem over even 
princes and emperors. And when all these prerogatives were assumed, the 
empire of the Popes had no limits, — the Bishop of Rome was the liege 
lord of mankind. 

As the rightful leaders of religious wars, the Popes were enabled to bend 
these wars to their own ends. The secular power became the mere instru- 
ment of the pontifical will. "Thus," says Hallam, "was developed that 
persecuting spirit, which produced the devastation of Languedoc, the stakes 
and scaffolds of the Inquisition, and which rooted deep in the religious 
theory of Europe those maxims of intolerance, which it has so slowly and 
so imperfectly renounced." And Milman has shown how Crusades against 
the Turks were fitly accompanied by the slaughter of Jews in every city on 
the Rhine, and how the massacre of the Albigenses in the south of France, 
the expeditions of Teutonic knights against the northern heathen, the 
expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the conquest of Mexico by Cortez, 
and Philip the Second's exterminating war upon the Netherlands — in 
short, every war against those whom the Pope was pleased to call heretics 
and infidels — came to be dignified and hallowed by the sacred name of the 
cross. Of all the religious persecutions conducted or sanctioned by the 
Roman See, the fruitful seed was planted when Urban made his plea at 
Clermont eight hundred years ago. 

And yet vaulting ambition never more signally overleaped itself, than in 
these mighty assumptions of temporal power on the part of the Papacy. 
The hand that grasped began to wither, even as it touched the prize. The 
Popes gained no lasting influence in the East. Instead of being reconciled 



496 THE CRUSADES. 

and absorbed, the Byzantine empire was alienated forever, — the crusading 
armies were swarms of locusts that stripped the eastern provinces that they 
visited, of every green thing. The disputes in which the sovereign Pontiff 
was arbiter, often embarrassed him without giving him real power. As 
time advanced, his commands were not seldom disobeyed, and, without sec- 
ular power to enforce his decrees instantly and without appeal, his authority 
fell into disrepute. Amid the disorders of the eastern wars, and far from 
all prospect of punishment, the Crusaders learned an independence of 
ecclesiastical, as well as of civil, authority. Orders of armed monks, like the 
Templars and the Hospitalers, attained a dangerous wealth and influence. 
The armies blessed by the Popes were too often diverted from their sacred 
object to wars of ambition and conquest. The tenths for every Crusade, 
and for every attempt at a Crusade, led to searching questions as to their 
disposal. Funds raised, but misappropriated, furnished strong weapons to 
Luther even after the lapse of three centuries. The personal motives with 
which the later Crusades were preached became too plain to be mistaken. 
Complaint began, and complaints against the Vicar of God, though a nov- 
elty at first, grew at last so deep and strong as to endanger all that had been 
gained through centuries of usurpation. 

The Papal authority suffered greatly from the growth of temporal powers 
which the Crusades assisted. There had been reason enough why the Church 
should rule. There was no other stable element in society. It alone, of all 
mediaeval institutions, was stable, because it had its root in opinions and 
beliefs. Without this possession of great power on the part of the Church, 
it is difficult to see how Europe could have been civilized. But, as the 
governments of the several States became efficient, the need of Church power 
diminished. As we shall see, the Crusades did much to bring about this 
settlement of the monarchies of Europe. It was only a natural consequence 
that, as the great temporal powers became established and consolidated, the 
Popes should lose their ascendency in European politics. 

The idea has prevailed that the clergy amassed great wealth during the 
Crusades. This was true during the first Crusade, for which they were not 
compelled to pay. Landed property, in which the Jew did not deal, but 
upon which ecclesiastical establishments lent money, fell to the Church in 
immense tracts. But, in all the subsequent Crusades, contributions were 
levied upon ecclesiastics also. Churches sold their ornaments and sacred 
vases to pay these taxes, and a competent authority has estimated that in 
two hundred years the clergy expended for the holy wars a larger sum than 
would have purchased all their property. Hence, their crusading zeal 
perceptibly cooled, so that the Popes did not dare intrust the preaching of 
the later Crusades to the bishops, but committed it to the Mendicant Orders, 
who had nothing to lose by it. 

Guizot mentions another effect upon the Church, which must be taken 
with a grain of allowance. Laymen, he urges, had hitherto had no direct 
communication with the centre of the Church. Now they passed through 
Rome. They saw the Papacy and its abuses, without ecclesiastical spectacles. 
Church and people were brought nearer to each other, and the latter acquired 
new boldness. It was the beginning of that inspection and inquiry which 
terminated in the revolt of Luther. But let us not attribute to the mediaeval 



THE CRUSADES. 497 

traveler a spirit too far in advance of his time. There were other influences 
at Rome, which might have served to repress his skepticism. Whatever of 
art the West possessed was there. Passing through the Eternal City, may 
we not fairly represent him as dazzled with the splendors of the pontifical 
throne, and as departing with no greater diminution of his reverence than 
happens to a modern Catholic in his visit to the seat of St. Peter? 

And yet, there was such a thing as corruption of the clergy, and a large 
part of the subsequent infamy of Popes and priesthood must be traced back 
to its beginning in these wars, — and here was the secret of the downfall of 
Papal power. What the Hohenstaufen could not accomplish by any outward 
force, that internal rottenness did accomplish, namely, the collapse of the 
lofty structure of pontifical supremacy over the princes and kings of the 
earth. Such corruption was inseparable from the life of armies, — and of 
those armies the clergy constituted a part. Prelates arrayed themselves in 
cuirass and helmet; country priests led on their flocks to battle. The 
Crusades were one long school of licentiousness and ferocity. Morality was 
outraged by the excesses of ecclesiastics in the holy wars. Meddling in 
what were soon perceived to be mere human strifes, and carried away by 
every passion that degraded ordinary humanity, the ministers of the Church, 
and the Church itself, lost immeasurably more than they gained. If I am 
pointed to the great works of the scholastic theology which from this epoch 
began to proceed from the monasteries, I call them signs, not of advancing 
power in the Church, but rather of the new intellectual spirit which followed 
the Crusades, and which the Church could not resist. During these two 
hundred years, the doctrines and opinions of the Church suffered no material 
change. Dogmatic theology, like pure literature, seldom flourishes in times 
so averse to silent and steady thought ; and, therefore, we are warranted in 
asserting without reserve that, before the two crusading centuries were over, 
the acme of the power of Ecclesiastical Rome had passed, and the Papacy 
had entered upon that slow decline which has proceeded intermittently, but 
surely, from that time until the present day. 

We have considered the influence of these great wars upon the Church, — 
let us look for a moment at their effects upon the State. The cardinal point 
on which mediaeval history turns is nothing else than the struggle of 
theocracy against feudal monarchy, — so says a great philosopher of history, 
and truly, German and metaphysician though he be. And what the Crusades 
did for feudalism, must be regarded as one of the foremost benefits which 
they have conferred upon mankind. They were the first great event of the 
period from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, in which the isolated 
elements of European society came for the first time together, and began 
those experiments which ended in the establishment of European as well 
as national unity. It is only since the thirteenth century that we can call 
France a nation, or really speak of monarchy and nobility, of government 
and people. From isolation and antagonism, these elements united with 
each other, and formed what was before unknown — the compacted State. 
This is plain, when we compare the age which preceded with the age 
which followed the Crusades. Charlemagne had exhausted every power of 
royalty in the endeavor to establish a second Roman Empire ; but, after his 
death, the bow was again unstrung, and society fell into its former isolation. 
3? 



498 THE CRUSADES. 

He had waged war upon the feudal system, because it destroyed all protective 
power, all tutelary and national legislation. The monarch, without authority, 
could not be the supporter of innocence or the avenger of crime. Sovereignty 
was exercised by every man who had a sword, and the feudal noble was little 
inferior, and paid only nominal subjection to the King. Though this 
individualism was a protection against despotism and universal conquest, 
though it had within it the seeds of all after-ideas of chivalry and freedom, 
it did not give stability to government or to justice. It was necessary that 
individualism should give place to a concentrated power, which could punish 
offenders and build up a united state. From the ancient civilization, in 
which the State absorbed the individual, society had swung to the precisely 
opposite extreme, — each individual could say with Louis the Fourteenth : 
"I am the State." What was needed, if civilization should advance or even 
be rescued, was a combination of the two ideas — individual independence, 
with its variety and freedom, but individual independence regulated and 
harmonized into compact society by the overshadowing force of equal laws. 

The first result of the Crusades that tended in this direction was the 
absorption of small fiefs into the large. Many a great baron who served in 
these wars died without heirs, and his estate reverted to the crown ; many 
a vassal who was fired with crusading ardor, yet could not by feudal custom 
raise the expenses of his expedition by extraordinary taxes, sold his fief to 
the Crown, in expectation of conquering a richer one in Palestine. William 
Rufus bought his elder brother's dukedom of Normandy. By the assemblies, 
which, though disused for a hundred years, were now called to consult with 
the King, the Crown was aided in recovering the lost legislative power. 
The great vassals of France, besides, scarcely acknowledged a King of France 
until they beheld these Kings of France gathering glory and dominion in 
the holy wars. Thus, in France, was seen an aggrandizement of royalty, 
both in territory and influence, which was necessary to the future civiliza- 
tion of Europe, — and this aggrandizement was at the expense of a turbulent 
and powerful feudal nobility. 

France undoubtedly furnishes the best illustration of the influence of the 
Crusades on feudalism. At the beginning of these wars, we see monarchy 
weaker in France than in any other European nation. At their close 
monarchy in France is stronger than in any other. Through the influences 
we have mentioned, there have come at last to be, in place of a variety of 
ruling classes — clergy, kings, nobles, citizens, husbandmen and serfs — only 
two, namely, government and people. Thus was brought about a localiza- 
tion of society and a union of its separate elements into the unity of the 
State, without which there could be no general administration of justice, no 
end of private war, no broad and wise legislation. 

And yet, beyond the mere organization of elements hitherto scattered and 
inharmonious, something must be attributed to the new spirit of gentleness 
and conciliation which made this organization possible. No account of the 
settling of modern society can be complete which omits all mention of the 
influence of chivalry. The loyalty, liberality and courtesy of knighthood 
was to a large extent the fruit of the Crusades. It was something for a 
baron of the eleventh or twelfth century to take upon him even the sem- 
blance of a religious vow. It was more, when the youth became a knight 



THE CRUSADES. 499 

through a prolonged novitiate in which his qualities of loyalty and bravery 
wore equally tested, and his final enterprises received the sanction and bless- 
ing of the church. Service of the church in a war against infidels was not 
the highest conceivable service, but it was far higher than the brutal license 
and unprovoked marauding to which the Crusader had given himself at 
home. And men are civilized by frequent meeting with each other. Isola- 
tiou would have left the French noble the same old barbarian. Company 
with brave men gave him the first start toward chivalry. Wonderful con- 
trasts there doubtless are, in those old chronicles. Godfrey could burn Jews 
alive, but he would not be called King, in the city where Christ had worn a 
crown of thorns. The crusading army could slaughter seventy thousand Sar- 
acens without mercy, but they could close the day of carnage by falling on 
their knees with one accord, and bursting into tears as they thought upon 
the sufferings of their Redeemer. But on the whole they came back better 
than they went, and with them they brought into the life and intercourse 
of Europe the first beginnings of that spirit tender and true, pitiful and 
brave — the spirit of generosity and aspiration and loyalty and honor — 
which still in the modern gentleman preserves whatever of worth there was 
in chivalry. 

Not simply the castles of the barons, however, but the towns and cities of 
Europe, felt the influence of the Crusades. The Mediterranean capitals, 
enriched by the transport and trade of the Crusaders, were enabled to assert 
their liberty or to buy it of their Suzerain. Alexander III struck an alli- 
ance with the whole group of Lombard towns ; and, in order to construct a 
bulwark against Germany, he gave them freedom and constituted himself 
as their defender. The Italian cities became little republics, able to wage 
wars of offense through their hired troops, and to maintain their independ- 
ence against all invaders. The seaports had their fleets and conducted their 
naval expeditions against the Saracens, or against enemies nearer home. 
Venice could lose thirteen thousand sailors in one defeat, yet easily recover 
from the blow. And, with Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, all rose to mag- 
nificence, and shed abroad the influence of a free and enterprising spirit. 
Now were erected the Campaniles of Florence, Venice and Bologna, which, 
like the Belfries of Ghent and Bruges in the Netherlands, were none of them 
erected for purely sacred purposes, but as the means of summoning together 
inhabitants of town and surrounding country alike, in any sudden emer- 
gency in which free citizens might be called upon to act. So stroag and 
widespread was this tendency to municipal freedom, that before the conclu- 
sion of the last Crusade, all the considerable cities of Italy had purchased 
or extorted large immunities from the Emperors and the Popes. From 
Italy the freedom of corporate towns spread to France and Germany, and 
a great body of the people in those lands became released from feudal ser- 
vitude. These communities did much to introduce regular government, 
police, arts, and the spirit of liberty, among the mass of the people. And 
thus, to the political unity, which was one result of the Crusades, was added 
another, no less important, namely, the liberty of the individual citizen. 

But one other result of the Crusades remains to be noticed — a result 
which, though the most difficult to be fully understood, was perhaps the 
greatest of their benefits, for it may be said to underlie all the others — I 



500 THE CRUSADES. 

mean the impulse which the Crusades gave to the human intellect. We 
need only to compare the condition of Europe at the beginning of these 
wars — sunk in ignorance and barbarism — with the bright promise of all 
things at their conclusion, to realize that a great change had been already 
wrought. Travel showed to the Franks a new and unimagined world. 
Constantinople was the greatest and most beautiful city in Europe. The 
barbarian had never wasted it. Though freedom and virtue had departed, 
the ancient elegance of arts and manners remained. The Eastern Court was 
one of oriental magnificence. Even the Mohammedans had still the remnants 
of a high civilization. While the Arabian and the Greek writers always 
speak of the Franks as barbarians, William of Tyre never loses an opportu- 
nity to extol the virtues of Saladin, and the beauty of Constantinople. 
Western Europe caught an inspiration from the sight, and from this time 
advanced in refinement of manners and of arts. Manufactures were carried 
west. New inventions were imported into Europe. Navigation and dis- 
covery entered upon a new career of progress. The world began to travel. 
Marco Polo roved over Asia ; a Franciscan of Naples became Archbishop 
of Pekin ; and Sir John Mandeville, the poet and physician, traversed the 
jungles of Hindustan and the streets of Foutchou. Much need was there 
of travel, — for two hundred authors writing of Egypt make no mention of 
the Pyramids, and James of Vitry gravely talks about the Phoenix and the. 
Amazons of the East. 

In the chronicles of St. Denis, Anno Domini 1257, we read: "'William, a 
physician, brought some Greek books from Constantinople." It was the first 
gleam of new light for the West. Then came the revival of literature and 
art. Poetry was written once more, and the foundations of modern litera- 
ture were laid. The old French didactic poetry sprang into being. The 
Troubadours sang through the south of France, and the Minnesingers an- 
swered them from Germany. The mighty mediaeval architecture, full of a 
religious spirit from the age before, rose to the admiration of all after time. 
In Paris, and Oxford, and Bologna, ten thousand students were opening 
every day unthought-of mines of classic beauty, and were digging with all 
reverence into the treasures of the Roman law. From roots that lay deep 
hidden in the black soil of desolation and disaster, was growing up a fair 
new civilization. 



XLVIII.' 
DMTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY.* 

Once upon a time, as the story books would say, or to speak more his- 
torically and exactly, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and eighty- 
six, and in the month of August, a little company of fairly intelligent people 
determined to put their vacation to use. The scene and the surroundings 
were propitious. We were upon the banks of Canandaigua Lake, the love- 
liest of those parallel sheets of water which so diversify the landscape of 
central and western New York. From the veranda, where we assembled 
after breakfast, Bare Hill loomed up across the lake, like Vesuvius over the 
Bay of Naples. The quiet summer mornings, the shade of the great elms, 
and the deep blue sky, invited us to something more serious than vers de 
socieie. Some one spoke of the Divine Comedy, and wondered if anybody 
had ever read it through. It was a revelation, a challenge, and an admoni- 
tion. Most of us had read the Inferno, but had been so ill-pleased with 
Dante's Hell, that we had never cared to try his Purgatory, or even his 
Paradise. But a new resolve was taken. We would begin, and finish. Forth- 
with were produced the translations of Carey, Wright, and Longfellow. Two 
of us knew something of Italian, and had with us the original poem. We 
brought to our help the English version of Dr. Carlyle and Mr. Butler, with 
the Italian original on the same page. Best of all, we read by way of intro- 
duction and of comment "The Shadow of Dante," by Maria Francesco 
Rossetti, from which I take much of value in the composition of this Essay. 
An hour and a half each morning for four weeks sufficed to accomplish our 
task. Indeed it was no task ; the pauses for discussion were numberless ; 
its beauty grew upon us ; when we finally closed our books the four weeks 
seemed four days, for the love we bore to the poet and the poem. I have 
since read the essays of James Russell Lowell and of Dean Church — the 
former very learned and thoughtful, though conceived from a literary point 
of view; the latter strong and eloquent, the work of a moralist and a 
preacher. I undertake now to give the condensed result in my own mind 
of this bit of summer study, — not, however, without the expectation and 
acknowledgment that pieces of others' learning will here and there shine 
through my writing, as through a palimpsest. I have let my reader into the 
secret of its origin, if by any means I may tempt him to go and do likewise. 

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, in the year 1265, — so that my story 
takes us back more than six hundred years. The middle ages were coming 
to their end. The Crusades had wakened Europe from her sleep of centuries ; 
the classic literature had begun to attract its devotees ; the free cities 



* A Lecture delivered at Vassar College, February 21 and 22, 1888, and 
printed in the Chicago Standard. December, 1887. 

501 



502 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

had established themselves; there was everywhere the stir of new political 
and religious life. But it was a time of strife. The Guelphs, the party of 
the Popes, and the Ghibcllines, the party of the Emperors, were hotly con- 
testing every point of vantage in city and country; although in Italy the 
Ghibellines were strong in the .provincial districts, while the Guelphs were 
strong in the towns. To the Guelph party Dante's family belonged. He 
does not appear to have been of noble birth ? for he afterwards held office, — 
and the constitution of Florence at the time forbade this to nobles. But he 
does appear to have been born to wealth ; he certainly possessed the means 
of the highest education the age could give ; he was ever in the front rank 
of his contemporaries, both in society and in politics. Of his youth we have 
handed down to us but a single incident,- — fortunately, that was the most 
important incident of his life. It was his meeting with Beatrice. 

At the age of nine years he first saw the lady of his dreams- It was at a 
festival at the house of her father, Folco Portinari. She was but a little 
damsel, no older than himself, but she was habited in crimson, and the sight 
of her was the awakening of his spirit. The next meeting of which we have 
record was nine years after, and that seems to have been a casual encounter 
on the street, leaviug only a glance and a gentle word to be remembered. 
We do not know that Dante ever sought Beatrice in marriage ; she was a 
star apart, to be looked at from afar ; she married another, and she died at 
twenty-four ; she probably never knew of the influence she exerted ; and 
yet, from the day of that festival at her father's house, she was the ruler of 
Dante's soul. Sense did not mingle with his passion. Beatrice became to 
him the symbol of all spiritual beauty. When he reaches Paradise, he is 
lifted from each lower sphere of heaven to the next higher simply by gazing 
into the transparent depths of Beatrice's eyes. "'The thoughts of youth are 
long, long thoughts," and the resolves then formed prove often the strongest 
resolves of a life-time. So the loves of youth may be long, long loves. A 
true affection never dies, and* the Psalmist never spoke more truly, than 
when he said: "Tour heart shall live forever." That meeting at the festival 
was not the first time, nor the last time, that the sight of a little damsel in 
pink or blue has turned the head of some great man, and so has changed the 
face of the world. 

I wish we could say that Dante was absolutely faithful to the memory of 
Beatrice. But history, and his own acknowledgments, are too much for u*. 
There was a little time when, possibly to distract his mind after her death, 
he plunged into a skeptical philosophy and yielded to the attractions of 
sense. A rival, whom he calls the adversary of reason, and whom he pic- 
tures as a woman at a window, temporarily absorbed his thoughts. But the 
spell could not last. Let us adapt and use the lines of Tennyson : 

" Faith in womankind 
Beat with his blood, and trust in all things high 
Tame easy to him; and, though he tripped and fell. 
He could not blind his soul with clay. - ' 

How noble a lesson there is in the fact that the breaking of the evil spell is 
coincident with a second vision of Beatrice! As there rises before his imagi- 
nation the fair form of his lost love, still habited in crimson as he had seen 
her so long before, yet now invested with a purity and glory that belonged to 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 503 

heaveu rather than to earth, the claims of sense and of unbelief seem to fall 
away from Dante's soul. The new life begins, of which the Vita Nuova is 
the history. Beatrice, who has rescued him, becomes to him God's angel 
and minister, the perfect combination of nature and grace, the symbol and 
embodiment of that heavenly wisdom which alone can free man from the 
anguish of doubt and the degradation of sin. Henceforth he identifies her 
with divine philosophy, and in token of his renewed and perpetual allegiance 
to his first-beloved he writes these words: "There appeared to me a mar- 
velous vision, wherein I saw things which made me resolve to say no more 
of this blessed one until I could more worthily treat of her. And to come 
to this I study as much as I can, as she knows in truth. So that if it be the 
pleasure of Him by whom all things live that my life shall last somewhat 
longer, I hope to say of her that which has never yet been said of any woman. 
And may it then please Him who is the Lord of loving-kindness that my 
soul may go to behold the glory of its lady, that is, that blessed Beatrice 
who gloriously gazes upon the face of Him who is blessed forever!" 

And so the Divine Comedy is Beatrice's monument. It was the labor of 
a life-time. It was prepared for by profound and extensive studies. What 
is true of every great poet was especially true of Dante — he was master of 
all the learning of his time. It was easier then than now, to compass all 
human knowledge. Thomas Aquinas had written, and from his immense 
Suimna the poet had learned theology. Aristotle furnished him with his 
philosophy. Homer and Virgil were his masters in poetry. He was deeply 
read in history, both sacred and profane. Whatever of physical science had 
then been discovered, whatever of medicine or of law was taught in the 
schools, all the culture that music, painting, architecture and sculpture could 
give — all these were Dante's possession. But more than this, he was a man 
among men, a citizen, a diplomatist, a statesman. Grave yet eloquent, com- 
posed yet capable of heroic decisions, an ardent lover of his country and a 
soldier in her defense, he had that large knowledge of affairs and that expe- 
rience of human nature which fitted him to speak to the very heart of his 
generation, and indeed to the human heart in all ages and everywhere. He 
had moreover the sublime self-confidence of genius. He entered unabashed 
into the company of the greatest poets, as he met them in the world of spir- 
its; and, even in Florence, when it was proposed to send him on an embassy 
to Rome, he replied: "If I go, who remains? and if I remain, who goes?" 

But neither study nor political life alone would have qualified him to write 
his great poem. It needed the heavy blows of exile, poverty and suffering, 
to forge the argument of the Divine Comedy. In the year 1300, Dante was 
elected one of the chief-magistrates of Florence ; and, perceiving that his 
native city could have no peace unless the leaders of its factions were ban- 
ished, he used his two months of brief authority to send these leaders beyond 
the borders of the state. It was a patriotic and unselfish act; for among 
them, and in either party, were certain of his personal friends. It was 
abstract justice, without regard to consequences; and when the tide turned 
and his enemies returned to power, they gave him the same measure which 
he had meted out to them. In 1302 a' heavy fine was imposed upon him, 
and when he refused to pay, his entire estate was confiscated, and it was 
decreed that, if he should be found again in Florence, he should be burned 



604 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

alive. Henceforth Dante became a wanderer upon the face of the earth. 
In 1310 he appears to have gone to Paris, — perhaps to Oxford. After his 
return he was offered amnesty, upon condition of paying fine and acknowl- 
edging criminality. But he scorned to enter Florence except with honor. 
'The means of life will not fail me," he said. "In any case I shall be able 
to gaze upon the sun and stars, and to meditate upon the sweetest truths of 
philosophy." 

Let us enter in imagination into the fortunes of this son of Florence, her 
truest patriot and her greatest man, cast out by an unloving mother, though 
every stone of her streets and every foot of her soil were sacred to him as 
they could be to no other. He became a Ghibelline, in hope that the Em- 
peror's coming would restore just authority and would right the wrong. 
Poor, and exposed to all "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," he 
wandered from one petty Ghibelline court to another, illustrating all too well 
the words of his own prophecy : 

" Thou shalt have proof how savoreth of salt 
The bread of others, and how hard a road 
The going down and up another's stairs." 

The lines of sweetness in his youthful portrait hardened and deepened into 
the sad, stern countenance of his later years. The very dignity of his 
nature, that forbade outward complaint, threw him inward upon himself. 

" Seldom he smiled, and smiled in such a sort 
As if to scorn his nature that could be moved 
To smile at anything." 

Yet morose and despairing he never did become. As the outward darkness 
of his lot deepened about him, a light that never was on sea or land "so 
much the more shone inward." As he walked up and down in Northern 
Italy, leaving traditions of his sojournings connected with many a ruined 
castle and mountain-torrent, there were opening before his vision great 
truths with regard to God and his judgments ; he was gathering vast knowl- 
edge of nature and of the human heart ; aye, he was mapping out heaven, 
earth and hell, for the generations to come. There can be no doubt that he 
regarded himself as a sort of prophet. From the heavenly spheres he looked 
down upon this earth of trial and sifting, and saw the meaning of it: 

" The threshing-floor that maketh us so proud, 
To me, revolving with the eternal Twins, 
Was all apparent made, from hill to harbor." 

And so, revolving the Divine Comedy and bringing it into form, he passed 
nineteen years of sorrowful exile, until at last, far from home, at Ravenna, 
in the year 1321, and at the age of fifty-seven, Dante Alighieri died. 

Before speaking of the great poem in detail, it will be desirable to say 
something about the end which Dante had in view, and the means which he 
used to attain it. The first of its hundred cantos is a sort of Introduction 
to the whole, and we may well avail ourselves of the hints it gives us. Its 
first line, 

" In midway of the journey of this life." 
has doubtless a personal reference to the history of the writer, and fixes the 
date when its composition began at 1300. when Dante had just reached the 
age of thirty-five, having passed halfway through the three-score years and 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 505 

ten allotted to man. On the first day of that new year and that new cen- 
tury, he describes himself as wandering, half asleep, from the right path, 
and becoming entangled in the mazes of a dark wood. Before him rises a 
hill, to which he makes his way and up which he essays to climb, until he 
finds himself withstood and repelled in succession by three wild beasts, a 
swift leopard, a raging lion and a greedy wolf. These well-nigh drive him 
back upon the sunless plain, when suddenly he becomes aware that he is not 
alone. A gracious and majestic figure approaches, and offers succor and 
conduct : 

•' Follow thou me, and I will be thy guide 

And bring thee hence by an eternal place. 

Where thou shalt hearken the despairing shrieks, 

Shalt see the ancients spirits dolorous 

That each one outcries for the second death. 

And thou shalt then see those who are content 

Within the fire, because they hope to come, 

When that it be. unto the blessed race. 

To whom thereafter, if thou wouldst ascend, 

A sonl there '11 be more worthy this than I : 

Thee will I Leave with her, when I depart: 

Seeing that Emperor who above there rules, 

Because I was rebellious to his law, 

Wills to his City no access by me. 

In every part he sways, and there he reigns ; 

There is his City and the exalted seat. — 

Oh. happy he whom thither he elects! " 

It Is Virgil who thus offers himself as Dante's conductor through Hell and 
Purgatory; it is Beatrice who has sent him for Dante's deliverance, and 
who is to be his guide through Paradise after Virgil has led him through the 
two lower provinces of God's empire. 

Many have been the interpretations put upon the great poem. The true 
interpretation is that which finds in it a combination of meanings. Dante 
himself has told us that there are four separate senses which he intends his 
story to convey. There is the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the 
anagogical. In Psalm 114: 1. we have the words, "'When Israel went out 
of Egypt." This, says the poet, may be taken literally, of the actual deliv- 
erance of God's ancient people ; or allegoric-ally, of the redemption of the 
world through Christ ; or morally, of the rescue of the sinner from the bond- 
age of his sin ; or anagogically. of the passage of both soul and body from 
the lower life of earth to the higher life of heaven. So, from Scripture, Dante 
illustrates the method of his poem. We have his own warrant for beginning 
with the literal meaning, and for then superadding the spiritual. Nothing 
can be more plain than the personal element that runs through the poem — 
Dante's own life and spiritual struggles furnish the basis for all the rest. 
We cannot be far wrong in maintaining that the beginning of the poem 
describes Dante's own entanglement in the thickets of sense and unbelief ; 
his early efforts to make his way up the mount of knowledge and virtue by 
strength of his own ; the demonstration of his inability to cope with the lust 
of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life — the three adversaries 
which like wild beasts would drag him down ; the offer and the acceptance 
of superior aid. in order that he may know the truth and the truth may make 
him free ; and then his gradual growth in knowledge and holiness, as one 
after another the sins and infirmities of the soul are revealed and are put 



506 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

beneath his feet, until at last he rises to communion with God and to the 
society of the holy. In other words, and yet more briefly, the Divine Com- 
edy is an autobiographical Pilgrim's Progress, written from the point of 
view of the Middle Ages and the Roman Church. 

But this is only the beginning. Around and upon this core and founda- 
tion, is built up a wondrous symbolic structure, in which Dante has sought 
to express his ideas of God's relations to humanity. It has been well said 
that the ancient epic never rose above the individual. "Arms and the man 
I sing," said Virgil. Dante sings, not of himself, nor of any particular man 
alone, but of man in the largest sense, — ''his subject is man — as by merit or 
demerit, through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward 
or punishment of justice." Man, in this large sense, has two sides to his 
nature — an earthly and a heavenly, a temporal and a spiritual. In each of 
these relations he needs authority. God has therefore provided upon earth 
two rulers, the Pope to be his vicegerent in spiritual, the Emperor to be his 
vicegerent in temporal, things ; the former like the sun giving forth the ligb t 
of God's truth directly, the latter like the moon reflecting that of the former ; 
each has its sphere ; and each, being directly responsible to God, is in a cer- 
tain sense independent of the other. There is, therefore, a political sense in 
which the Divine Comedy must be taken ; and the constant interweaving of 
political incident and philosophy, which has struck so many as beside the 
purpose of the poem, is only a sign of its larger completeness and unity. 

Miss Rossetti has beautifully traced the working of this idea into the 
introduction of the poem. The darksome wood is the distracted and hopeless 
political condition of Italy. The hill of virtue and reason, that rose before 
the mind of Dante was the scheme of a stable and righteous commonwealth. 
But there was no material to build a city. The Guelph powers beset him. 
Factious Florence, proud France, avaricious Rome, are respectively the 
leopard, the lion, and the wolf, that set themselves against all order and all 
progress. Dante sinks back almost into despair of his country, when Virgil, 
the symbol of science and philosophy, appears for his deliverance, and brings 
him to a right understanding of the divine will, so far as the light of nature 
can go ; and, when that has done its utmost, divine grace, in the person of 
Beatrice, discovers to him the very consummation of God's plans for the 
temporal good of humanity. — Whatever we may think of the details of this 
interpretation, there can be no doubt that in Daute's soul there had dawned 
the idea of a free State, as well as that of a free Church. He was immeas- 
urably grieved and angered at the insane jealousies and enmities that tore 
his country in pieces. His prose essay, De Monorchia, shows that his 
advocacy of Ghibelline doctrine, in the latter half of his life, was based upon 
the conviction that only the supremacy of the Emperor could deliver Italy 
from the wiles of the Papacy, and give her a strong and solid government. 

Italian unity, and the independence of church and state, both found their 
first great advocate in Dante, — or rather, shall we say, first found germinal 
expression in his writings. No stronger bond than love for Dante has for 
centuries, in spite of all her political divisions, preserved a moral unity in 
Italy. And now at length even Dante's dream of political unity has worked 
its own realization. The pen has proved mightier than the sword, because it 
has led men to wield the sword, in securing and defending the unity of Italy. 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 507 

So far, as to the temporal or political aim of Dante's poem — the settle- 
ment of the true principles upon which civil society should be built. This, 
however, is not its chief aim. The spiritual side of man is more important 
than this. The poet would set forth the nature of man as a subject of God, 
free to obey or to disobey, aud bound to answer to his own conscience and to 
Him who made him. And here we must remember that, with all Dante's 
reverence for God's spiritual vicegerent upon earth, he never fails to distin- 
guish between the office and him who held it — between the Papacy and the 
individual Popes. He held loyally to Roman Catholic doctrine — indeed, 
there was none other in his day to hold to — but held to it in no slavish way. 
He abhorred the temporal power of the Papacy ; he regarded it as usurpa- 
tion of the prerogatives of the State, treachery to the spiritual calling of the 
Vicar of God, and cause of all the divisions and miseries of Italy. He has 
denounced the pride and venality of many a Pope, and he has put some of 
them, heels upward, in hell. We cannot think him lacking in courage, when 
we hear him calling the rulers of the church "'Antichrist:" 

" Your avarice o'erwhelms the world in woe, 

To you St. John referred, O shepherds vile I 
When she, who sits on many waters, had 

Been seen with kings her person to defile ; 
(The same, who with seven heads arose on earth, 

And bore ten horns, to prove that power was hers, 
Long as her husband had delight in worth). 

Your gods ye make of silver and of gold ; 
And wherein differ from idolaters, 

Save that their god is one, yours manifold? 
Ah Constantine ! what evils caused to flow, 

Not thy conversion, but those fair domains 
Thou on the first rich Father didst bestow! " 

In Dante's expositions of Scripture he has given us independent judgments ; 
widely read as he was in sacred and patristic learning, we find him ever 
applying the Bible to matters of common life ; as we unconsciously get some- 
thing of our theology from Milton, many an educated Italian only quotes 
Dante when he thinks he is quoting the Bible. The whole range and com- 
pass of man's spiritual being is the subject of Dante's treatment. He intended 
nothing less than to set forth the whole process and philosophy of man's fall 
and man's restoration. Not simply the outward means for the cure of souls, 
but the great array of spiritual agencies that work for the punishment of the 
lost and the recovery of the penitent, constitute the subject of his story. 
Let us put ourselves again, then, with the poet, in the dreary wood. The 
poet is only the image of humanity, straying away from God and miserably 
perishing in its sin. There is left only the voice of conscience to urge it up 
the steep hill-side of knowledge and virtue, and this upward impulse is more 
than counteracted by the arts and devices of the great adversary. Human- 
ity needs all the help that can come from both earth and heaven. God sends 
human teachers, and these show men the nature and the consequences of 
their sins and the means of purification from them. Virgil is the representa- 
tive of the highest earthly wisdom. He can lead us to a terrestrial paradise ; 
but, if we would pass beyond, we must have a higher guide. Beatrice is 
divine science, the teaching of the Spirit, God's highest gift to men. He 
who yields to the lower teaching shall have the higher. Dante's taking Vir- 



508 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

gil for his guide is the symbol of the whole race of man putting itself under 
God's elementary tuition, that it may learn the truth that will deliver it 
from hell and lift it to heaven. 

So the poem which has autobiography for its centre, embraces not only 
the doctrine of the State, but widens out until it takes in universal humanity 
and the true relations of that humanity to God. The Divine Comedy is an 
attempt to put all theology and all philosophy into poetical form, that man 
may have before his eyes an interpretation of the universe of things, a con- 
crete representation of eternal truth, a justification of the ways of God to 
men. It is the loftiest conception ever framed by any earthly poet, and the 
execution is worthy of the theme. The Divine Comedy was the first Chris- 
tian poem ; it seems to us also to be the greatest. 

So much for Dante's aim; let us consider now the means he used to 
attain it, — I mean his scheme of the universe, and the external vehicle by 
which he communicated his thought ; or, first, his cosmology, and secondly, 
his verse. We must remember that Dante lived before Kepler; his system 
was not the Copernican, but the Ptolemaic. To understand his poem with- 
out knowing this, is as impossible as it would be for a school-boy to learn 
geography without a map. Ptolemy did not hold to a flat, but to a spher- 
ical earth ; yet he did hold that the earth was the centre of all, and that 
sun, moon and stars all revolved around it. There were two hemispheres — 
an eastern hemisphere of land, and a western hemisphere of water. In the 
centre of the hemisphere of land is the city of Jerusalem, directly over the 
hollow pit of Hell ; in the centre of the hemisphere of water is the island- 
mount of Purgatory, up whose steep sides all penitents must climb to 
heaven. Neither Hell nor Purgatory were created where they now are ; 
their present existence and location are results of Satan's fall. When the 
rebel angel was cast out from heaven, his immense mass and weight crushed 
through earth's surface to the very centre of the planet ; gravity prevented 
him from going further, and held him there fast bound. The very substance 
of the globe fled from him in horror, as he came hurtling down, and with 
these results : first, the great pit of hell was excavated, at the bottom of 
which Satan lies ; secondly, the waters of the eastern hemisphere were trans- 
ferred to the western, so that the eastern hemisphere is now laid bare ; 
thirdly, the portion of earth's substance displaced to form Hell, since it 
must go somewhere, was thrust up under the ancient Eden, and so the ter- 
restrial Paradise was made the summit of the purgatorial mountain in the 
midst of the waste of western waters. Ulysses is the only mortal who has 
seen that mount, and there it was that he met his fate. Tennyson's poem 
"Ulysses" is only a reminiscence of Dante. The mount of Purgatory is 
therefore "exactly at the antipodes of Jerusalem, and its bulk is precisely 
equal and opposite to the cavity of Hell." 

Hell and Purgatory belong to this planet. Earth alone is the abode of 
sin, and the place of penance. But as we leave earth and go upwards we find 
nine several heavens, one above the other, each a hollow revolving sphere, 
enclosing and enclosed. These are at once solid and transparent; in them 
the planets are fixed, to give light by day and night. First comes the heaven 
of the moon; beyond this the heaven of Mercury; then the heaven of 
Venus; fourthly, the heaven of the Sun, which Dante, after the fashion of 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 509 

his time, regarded as a planet revolving round the earth ; fifthly, the heaven 
of Mars ; sixthly, the heaven of Jupiter ; seventhly, the heaven of Saturn ; 
eighthly, the heaven of the Fixed Stars ; ninthly, the starless, crystalline 
heaven or Pritnum Motile, which moves most rapidly of all, and by so 
moving communicates movement to all the rest. Beyond all these nine 
heavens is a tenth, the motionless Empyrean of God and his saints. There 
the elect spirits of all time, arranged in ranks like the rising seats of an 
amphitheatre, surround a lake of light formed by the reflection of the 
divine glory from the convex upper surface of the Primum Mobile. It is 
the Rose of the Blessed, whose petals expanding on every side are made up 
of countless intelligences, all bright with the purity and the love of the 
highest heaven. 

Such is Dante's scheme of the universe. Let us ask now about his verse. 
He called his work "The Comedy;" the title "Divine" was given to it 
by admirers belonging to the next generation. He tells us that the 
designation "Comedy" was given to it because, though beginning in gloom 
and sorrow, it has a happy ending; it takes the reader through Hell and 
Purgatory, but it brings him to Paradise. The average reader, we fear, 
does not give to Dante's work the benefit of the poet's own explanation. He 
reads only the "Inferno," and insists on judging the whole by this single 
part. Here the grotesque and the revolting so fasten his attention that he 
declines to proceed further. He does not penetrate to the deep philosophy 
of Dante's treatment ; does not see that Dante's aim is to portray the folly 
and the monstrosity of sin ; does not appreciate the poet's aim of making 
all this a contrast and a foil to the sweetness of penitence and the joy of the 
redeemed. But he who has the grace and the patience to read the Purga- 
tory, and the Paradise as well, will find that Dante was right in not calling 
his poem "The Divine Tragedy." Dante is no pessimist. To his mind 
"all things work together for good;" and so his poem, which was meant 
to be an interpretation of the universe and a philosophy of history, rightly 
calls itself a "Comedy," for it describes the uplifting of humanity from 
sin to holiness, and from eternal sorrow to eternal joy. 

But there was still another reason for the cheerful title. The work is 
written, not in the stately and sonorous Latin with its classic elegance and 
coldness, but in the humble Italian of common speech, the newly emerging 
product of a new civilization, the language of the shop and of the home, 
rather than the language of the schools. And yet it is too much to say that 
this language existed before Dante wrote. Dante was rather its creator ; 
for the Italian language, with all its sweetness and purity and beauty, the 
language of love, of poetry, of philosophy, sprang complete from Dante's 
brain. There is something almost awe-inspiring in the sudden appearance 
of such a work as his, as new in its literary vehicle as it was in conception 
and in theme. It did more to fix the language of Italy than the French 
Academy ever did to fix the French, or the English Bible to fix the English, 
tongue. Six hundred years ago a language was spoken in France which no 
common Frenchman can understand to-day ; six hundred years ago a 
language was spoken in England which no common Englishman can under- 
stand to-day. But Dante's Italian is the Italian of modern speech. It is 
well worth while to learn a little Italian, for even a little will enable one to 



510 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

appreciate to some degree the sweet severity of Dante's verse ; the marvel 
ous compression which never wastes a word ; the fascination of the terza 
rima, or triple rhyme, whose endless reiterations seem like the recurrent 
melody, at one time of funeral, and at another time of marriage, bells. 

There is scarcely a more striking example of this fitness of phrase than 
In the solemn music which records the inscription over the gate of Hell : 

"Per me si va nella citta dolente; 

Per me si va nell' evno dolore: 
Per me si va tra lu perduta gente. 

Giustizia mosse il mio alto Fattore: 
Fecemi la divina Potestate, 

La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore. 
Dinanzi a me non fur cose create, 

SI non eterne, ed eterno duro ; 
Laseiate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate." 

Let us now compare the Italian with the English, and mark how the liquid 
and intense quality of the original well-nigh disappears in the translation : 

" Through me ye enter the abode of woe : 

Through me to endless sorrow are ye brought: 
Through me amid the souls accurst ye go. 
Justice did first my lofty Maker move ; 

By Power almighty was my fabric wrought. 
By highest Wisdom and by primal Love. 
Ere I was formed, no things created wera, 
Save those eternal — I eternal last: 
All hope abandon — ye who enter here ! " 

The gate Is "closed to none, being reft of all its fastenings since the day 
when the Conqueror of Death, fresh from the cross, forced through it his 
resistless passage." So Dante, following Virgil as his guide, pursues the 
deep and savage pathway and enters the Inferno. Let us enter with him. 
Hell, as we have seen, is a pit within the earth, a hollow, inverted cone, 
growing narrower as it descends; in which, as space contracts, torment is 
intensified. The outermost borders of the pit constitute an Ante-Hell, 
rather than hell itself. It is the abode of the Neutrals, those who are not 
good enough for Heaven, and who have not character enough for Hell. 
Here are confined the angels who at the first great rebellion in the spirit- 
world stood neither for God nor for his enemies, but only for themselves. 
Here are confined a large part of the human race, even as the circuit of this 
uppermost region of the Inferno is the widest. These feeble and cowardly 
souls, stung by flies and wasps, the image of a reproving conscience, chase 
a hurrying standard, while worms in the dust beneath their feet absorb their 
blood and tears. So Dante punishes those who only ignored God, but did 
not have force enough to rebel against him. He crosses the River Acheron, 
the joyless river, with Charon for his ferryman, who grimly drives the 
reluctant souls out of his boat with the blows of his oar. So they reach 
Hell proper, a pit of nine circles, each furnishing a landing-place, on one 
side of which Is the wall of solid earth, on the other the abyss. 

The first circle of the Inferno proper is called Limbo — the home of 
Infants who died unbaptized, and of non-believers who had no knowledge 
of a Saviour. Here once dwelt the saints of Old Testament times ; but when 
Christ descended into the underworld after his resurrection, he rescued 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 511 

them and led them forth in triumph. Here still, and forever, dwell the 
heathen sages whose ignorance was invineihle. There is no outward 
infliction. Their pain is the pain of loss, of unsatisfied yearning. Within 
a castle of seven-fold walls and gates they lead their shadowy life, neither 
sad nor glad, grave and subdued in aspect, conversing still with regard to 
the problems of existence, knowing nothing of the present, but only of the 
past and future. It is the highest point of attainment for unbelievers. 
Here Virgil points out "the luminous habitation of the poets." Homer 
and Horace receive Dante into their company, and show him Socrates, 
Plato, and other master-spirits of antiquity. When they leave him, he 
re-enters the domain of darkness ; passes before Minos, the infernal Judge ; 
and now at length descends into the Hell of positive sin and of real 
punishment. 

It will be worth our while here to pause a moment, and consider the three 
great divisions under which Dante classifies the sins punished in the eight 
circles which we have still to visit. There are, to his mind, three great 
types and gradations of sin. They are Incontinence, Bestiality, and Malice. 
But neither incontinence nor bestiality are precisely what these words 
would seem to indicate. Incontinence includes all sin of mere emotion and 
desire, of affection and feeling. Lasciviousness, gluttony, avarice and anger 
all belong to this category. They are sins of impulsive passion, exaggera- 
tions of principles of our nature which are themselves innocent, but which 
are indulged in manner or measure opposed to the will of God. It is 
significant that all these sins are punished in darkness, as befits the nature 
of them, committed as they have been with mind beclouded by passion. 
And the respective punishments are punishments in kind. Carnal sinners 
are swept along by a violent hurricane, as if to intimate that they who have 
sown the wind must reap the whirlwind. Gluttons lie prostrate on the 
ground, beneath a pelting storm of rain, snow and hail ; while Cerberus, a 
sort of personified belly, devours them. The avaricious and the prodigal 
crawl in two bands in opposite directions, pushing before them great 
weights, which clash together as they meet, the one band howling to the 
other: "Why did ye keep?" and the other howling in return: "Why did 
ye give away?" The wrathful and gloomy are immersed naked in a lake of 
mud, and in this lake they strike and tear each other. There is an 
impressive lesson here, — anger and melancholy are punished together. Too 
much indignation and too little indignation are equally sins. The wrathful 
and the wrathless both transgress God's law. "Be ye angry, and sin not," 
says the Scripture. "Ye that love the Lord, hate evil." Not to be angry 
at unrighteousness, smoothly and indolently to condone wrong-doing, this 
to Dante is sin against God, and they who commit it are imbedded in the 
dregs of the Stygian pool. 

We have been dealing with sins of feeling. How solemn a truth does 
the poet teach us when he makes sins of the thoughts to follow these ! For 
this is what he means by Bestiality, the next great class of transgressions. 
The bestial man is the man who is besotted in mind, and who gives himself 
over to infidelity or to heresy; who either says with the fool: "There is 
no God," or says with the errorist: "God is different from what he has 
revealed himself to be." Here, in the flaming city of Dis, where the walls 



512 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

are of iron and the darkness is mingled with fire, the arch-heretics are 
confined in red-hot tombs; as if to show the living death of the soul that 
cuts itself loose from faith in God and his revelation. Notice that this sin 
of bestialism or unbelief follows, and grows out of, the sin of wrong desire. 
The heart first departs from God, and then the intellect follows in its train. 
It is only an anticipation of Goethe's dictum: "As are the inclinations, so 
are the opinions." When man gives loose rein to evil affections, the eyes 
of his understanding are darkened. But there is something worse even 
than sin of the feelings and of the intellect: it is sin of consciously evil 
will; and so the third great class of iniquities in Dante's hell is that of 
Malice, in its ever-deepening forms, now of Violence, then of Fraud, and 
finally of Treachery. The sin of unbelief cannot maintain itself against 
the accusations of conscience except by becoming the sin of positive hatred 
and opposition to God. First the heart, then the intellect, and lastly the 
will, sets itself against Him who made it. 

Malice is punished after its kind also. The Violent, such as tyrants, 
murderers and marauders, are sunk in a boiling river of blood, and as often 
as they emerge are shot at by the Centaurs. Such the fate of those who 
commit violence against others, — they have their fill of blood. Suicides, 
or those who are guilty of violence against themselves, are turned into trees, 
whose living branches are plucked away by harpies, only to grow again. 
Blasphemers, or those who have done violence to God, are exposed to a slow 
shower of fire, upon a plain of burning sand. Below the circle where 
Violence is punished, at a vast depth indeed beneath, Fraud in its ten 
subdivisions has its place of doom. Here are seducers and flatterers, the 
first scourged by demons, the second immersed in filth. Simoniacs, who 
have purchased high places in the church with money, are fixed in circular 
holes, like purses, with their heads down, their legs only appearing, and 
the soles of their feet burnt with flames. Sorcerers or diviners, as they 
endeavored to pry into the future, have their heads twisted round so that 
they have to walk backward now. Barterers and peculators are plunged 
into a lake of boiling pitch. Hypocrites wear cloaks and hoods which are 
gilt outside, but are lined within with lead, whose heavy weight they try 
with groans to carry. Thieves are persecuted with a swarm of serpents. 
Evil counsellors are tormented in wrappings of flame that fit them as a 
garment. Slanderers and schismatics have their limbs miserably mangled. 
Alchemists and forgers are visited with an itching leprosy. 

Last of all comes the well of the primeval giants, the mythical demigods 
who rose against Jove in arms. They are representatives of the last and 
deepest intensity of sin, the Malice that becomes Ingratitude, and that 
betrays kindred and friends, king and country, and finally its very God and 
Saviour. Treachery is in Dante's scheme the utmost malignity of sin, its 
most complete and dreadful expression. The lowest pit is called the 
Judecca, because it holds Judas, who betrayed his Lord. And here Judas 
is tormented by Satan, to whom for thirty pieces of silver he sold himself. 
We have reached Hell's lowest point. Let us gaze at Satan there. He is a 
creature of monstrous size, — Dante gives us the means of estimating very 
accurately his dimensions. The primeval giants are each seventy feet tall ; 
Satan is twelve times as great — eight hundred and forty feet therefore in 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 513 

keight. At the very centre of the earth he sits, forever flapping his vast and 
bat-like wings in effort to escape, while these very movements chill the air 
and turn everything about him to frost and ice. He tries to escape, but 
every effort only freezes him more solidly into his place of imprisonment. 
He has three heads and three faces — red, white and black — to correspond 
with the three divisions of the human race which he has succeeded in 
leading to perdition ; in each one of his three mouths he is craunching and 
devouring a traitor, and of the three traitors Judas is chief. The centre 
of Hell is not fire but ice — fit type of the hardness and the coldness of the 
heart that is 'past feeling." The sin of sense has become the sin of malice, 
and malice has deepened into treachery and positive hatred to God. Feeling 
led the way into transgression, but the intellect followed, and then the will 
gave in its conscious adhesion to wrong, until there came the spurning of 
the very mercy that would save, and the sin against the Holy Ghost that 
hath never forgiveness, either in this world or in that which is to come. 

Before we leave the Inferno, it is important to note three things. The 
first is, that the grotesqueness and monstrosity of Dante's punishments are 
intended to teach a moral lesson — this namely, that sin is something 
essentially vile and contemptible. The "Divine Comedy" gives a very dif- 
ferent picture of Satan, for example, from that with which we have become 
familiar in the 'Paradise Lost." Milton's Satan is "the archangel ruined," 
but the emphasis seems often to lie upon the "archangel" rather than upon 
the "ruin" ; Satan has been called, indeed, "the hero of the Paradise Lost." 
But Dante is resolved that no illusive glamour shall surround the great 
enemy. He will picture him in all his native cruelty and hatred and 
malignity, a creature loathsome and loathed. Milton, it is true, has passages 
in which the adversary confesses to an inward torment. Those three words: 
"Myself am hell," contain the very essence of the doctrine of future 
punishment. But as we see Satan striding over the burning marl, asserting 
himself in rebellious pride, daring the Almighty to crush him with his 
thunderbolts, we are forced to admire the unconquerable will that had 
rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. And in all this, Milton is false to 
Scripture. Though Dante goes beyond the Bible in his grotesque physical 
usages, he expresses more of the spirit of the Bible than does Milton. Sin 
and sinners, he holds in derision. Even in the story of Francesca da 
Rimini we do not lose sight of the serpent that lies beneath the flowers ; 
guilty love has in it moral corruption and eternal despair. All Dante's 
demons are hateful ; no man through him shall be seduced into calling 
darkness light, or evil good. He declares that, just as surely as the right- 
eous shall rise to everlasting life, the wicked shall rise to shame and 
everlasting contempt. 

A second lesson which Dante teaches us is, that sin is the self -perversion 
of the will. If there is any thought fundamental to his system it is the 
thought of freedom. Man is not a waif swept irresistibly downward on the 
current; he is a being endowed with power to resist, and therefore guilty 
if he yields. Sin is not misfortune, or disease, or natural necessity; it is 
wilfulness, and crime, and self-destruction. The "Divine Comedy" is, 
beyond all other poems, the poem of Conscience ; and this it could not be, 
If it did not recognize man as a free agent, the responsible cause of his 
33 



514 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

own evil acts and bis own evil state. And Dante is a lover of God and of 
holiness. He puts himself on God's side, in the great moral controversy 
of the ages. He explains suffering by guilt ; he sees the whole race under 
the load of just penalty ; hell is to him only the sign of God's estimate of 
sin. Is there anything that our age needs more tban this strengthening of 
conscience, this assertion of the claims of righteousness, this declaration 
that "the soul that sinneth, it shall die" ? Would that our soft and 
easy-going time, soothed almost to sleep as it is by the tempter's voice, 
"Thou shalt not surely die," and inclined to compound with almighty 
Justice for indulgence in all sorts of pleasurable wickedness, — would that 
our age might listen to the awful voices of self-accusation and despair that 
sound out from Dante's Hell to proclaim the voluntariness and the dam- 
nableness of sin ! 

Still another lesson from the Inferno is, that penalty is not in its essence 
external to the sinner. Here I know I shall contradict the impressions of 
many of my readers. ' ' Dante not a believer in material and physical 
puuishment?" Ah, I did not say that. I said that to Dante the material 
and the physical were not the essence of punishment. I most earnestly 
believe that, with all the material imagery of Dante's Hell, he never meant 
us to take one of these physical punishments merely in its literal sense. 
He believed indeed in a body, and believed that God would destroy both 
soul and body in hell ; doubtless he expected that sins of the flesh would 
be punished in the flesh. But his view of sin as having its source and 
centre in the soul forbade him to put upon the mere body the main stress of 
penalty. People have made the same mistake about Jonathan Edwards. 
Because he speaks of the sinner as shriveling like a worm in the fire of 
God's judgments, some have supposed that he regarded hell as consisting 
mainly of such physical torments. But this is a misinterpretation of 
Edwards. As he did not fancy heaven to consist in streets of gold or 
pearly gates, but rather in the holiness and communion with Christ of 
which these are symbols, so he did not regard hell as consisting in fire and 
brimstone, but rather in the unholiness and separation from God of which 
fire and brimstone were symbols. He used the material imagery, because 
he thought that this best answered to the methods of Scripture. He 
probably went beyond the simplicity of the Scripture statements, and did 
not sufficiently explain the spiritual meaning of the symbols he used ; but 
I am persuaded that he neither understood them literally himself, nor 
meant them to be so understood by others. What is true of Edwards is 
true of Dante. In how many ways does he show that sin is essentially a 
condition of soul, an alienation of the heart from God, an inner conflict and 
agony! It is shown by the fact that living men are represented as already 
in hell ; as eternal life is already present in the souls of the good, so eternal 
death is already in the souls of the evil. It is shown by the fact that the 
sinner is made to punish himself; the wicked is holden in the cords of his 
own sins ; sin is its own detecter and judge and tormentor. Dante's doctrine 
Is ever this: "The responsible agent, man, does to himself whatever he 
does, and his deeds return to the doer." The material symbols are nothing 
more than symbols — symbols of the corruption and death which Is involved 
in sin itself — symbols of the fact that sin tends to permanence ; that sin 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 513 

at last is stamped upon the soul as Its eternal form ; that the free will 
becomes at last enslaved to evil; that the sinner, apart from divine grace, 
tends ever downward in an ever-increasing intensity of selfish will and an 
ever-increasing intensity of punishment. 

It is pleasant to emerge from the Inferno, even though we have learned 
from it so many lessons. Dante emerges under guidance of Virgil. Having 
passed the centre of the earth in his descent, he takes his upward way to the 
opposite side of the globe from that at which he entered. But the force of 
gravity is agaiust him now. Facilis descensus Avemo; and we may add: 
Ui/ficilis ascensns coelo. By what road does he ascend? Ah, there is a 
channel worn through the solid earth by the stream that flows downward 
from the mount of Purgatory. That stream is made up of the tears of the 
penitents who make reparation on the mount, and whose guilt and depravity, 
as fast as it is purged away, flows downward to Satan from whom it came, 
and with whom it now abides forever. As our toil-worn pilgrim emerges 
from the bowels of the earth, and plants his feet upon the mount of purifi- 
cation, the day begins to break, and the sorrow of his soul gives place to 
joy. He sees an angel-piloted bark approaching the island-mount, a bark 
Which brings to Purgatory, from the banks of the Tiber, all souls which 
have died at peace with the Church, and who only need to be freed from the 
remains of sin to be fitted for heaven. Here we need to remember that in 
Roman Catholic doctrine, Purgatory is only a temporary abiding-place. 
Purgation may last for hundreds of years, but it cannot last forever. All 
who enter Hell go there to stay. None ever stay in Purgatory. And yet 
none wish to depart, — they desire only to be cleansed. They bear willingly, 
yes, even gladly, the chastisements of God, which are meant for their cor- 
rection in righteousness. The reeds with which the shores of that island 
are fringed, yielding ever as they do to the swaying of the waves, are the 
symbol of the will of the mountain's habitants, bending ever to the slightest 
movement of the will of God. On this mount they bemoan their sins. It 
is a sweet and holy dwelling-place, irradiated by the Southern Cross, a con- 
stellation unseen in our cold northern climes ; the grassy slopes are kept 
green by the tears of the penitents ; angels visit the mount to encourage 
them, admonish them, guide them upward, in their toilsome striving ; hymns 
and prayers to God are continually ascending from its terraces, as from 
altar-stairs; its summit is the Terrestrial Paradise, from which by a short 
step the soul, with the temporary shade-body which it wears till the resur- 
rection, can rise from earth to heaven. 

There is an Ante-Purgatory, just as there was an Ante-Hell. This Ante- 
Purgatory is under the wardenship of Cato of Utica, that model of ancient 
self-control. Here at the base of the mountain are detained those who 
deferred repentance during their former life ; they are compelled to wait, 
outside of St. Peter's gate, a hundred years for every year of that former 
delay, — that is, are compelled to wait unless their stay is shortened by the 
pious prayers of friends whom they have left behind, one moment of whose 
intense intercessions has power to deliver from years of purgatorial sorrow. 
Voltaire said rightly that in Purgatory the church had found what Archi- 
medes vainly longed for, a ttoO otw upon which he might plant his lever 
to move the world. The souls in the place of preliminary trial chant tha 






51 G DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

Miserere and the Compline Hymn, and so get help against the adversary. 
At St. Peter's gate, Purgatory proper first begins. They approach it by a 
threefold stair, symbolic of the confession, contrition and satisfaction which 
the church requires. An angel with flaming sword keeps the door, charged 
to err by admitting, rather than to err by excluding, those who seek admis- 
sion there ; and yet there is a safeguard — he who after entering should look 
back, would again find himself without. Upon the brow of each one so 
admitted the angel with his sword of flame marks seven times the letter P, — 
which means Peccatum, Peccaii, and indicates that there are seven capital 
sins which must be successively purged away. There are seven terraces, 
each devoted to the purgation of one of these sins of Pride, Envy, Anger, 
Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lasciviousness ; and when the purgation of any 
one of these is complete, the corresponding mark of shame vanishes from 
the brow. So the process goes on until the forehead is pure, as at man's first 
creation ; and, as the soul leaps up in freedom and regains once more its 
lost estate of innocency, the whole mount of Purgatory shakes for joy. 

In the Inferno, sin grows in intensity as the circles narrow and we go 
downward. In Purgatory the rule is just the opposite ; the greatest sins are 
first purged away, and the mountain narrows as we ascend. Progress upward 
is at the first slow and difficult, and the heights are great. But each sin 
removed gives new freedom ; the distances grow smaller and the ascent more 
rapid; for "to him that hath shall be given," and when the sins that so 
easily beset are all laid aside, the soul "mounts up with wings as eagles;" 
nothing now is left to separate between it and God. There is another rela- 
tion between the structure of the Purgatory and that of the Hell, — sins in 
both are classified under three general divisions. In the Purgatory, however, 
the classification is that of the mediaeval theologians, into Love Distorted, 
Love Defective and Love Excessive. Under love distorted, pride, envy and 
anger are ranged — each being regarded as loving evil to one's neighbor. 
Love defective is represented only by sloth — this loves too little the highest 
good. Love excessive has three divisions ; avarice, or the excessive love of 
money ; gluttony, or the excessive love of food ; lasciviousness, or the exces- 
sive love of sensual pleasure. The seven terraces around the mountain are 
but eighteen feet in width, for "narrow is the way that leads to life." On 
the one side of each is the precipice ; on the other is the rocky wall, up which 
there is but one long and steep ascent, by stairs, to the terrace next above. 
Let us delay for one moment to glance at the chastisements of the Mount 
of Penitence. In the first circle Pride, the primal sin, and root of all other 
sins, is made to suffer. The proud are bowed to the earth by heavy weights 
of stone placed upon their backs ; and, as they move onward in long pro- 
cession, their eyes lifted up no longer, they look sideways at wonderfully 
sculptured representations of humility upon the rocky wall, or downwards 
at wonderfully sculptured representations of pride upon the pavement 
beneath their feet; while spirit-voices chant the Lord's Prayer and "Blessed 
are the poor in spirit." In the second terrace the Envious are punished, by 
having the eyes that looked askance on others sewed up with iron thread, 
while mantled in prickly hair-cloth they are compelled to sit shoulder to 
shoulder, leaning upon one another and recognizing their mutual obligation 
and dependence. The eyes that have transgressed are not permitted now to 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 517 

Bee, and so instruction is communicated to them by spirit-voices that record 
the various historical instances of love or of envy. "Blessed are the mer- 
ciful," and "Rejoice, O victor!" are the salutations that signalize release. 
The third circle is devoted to the chastisement of Anger. This, too, is pun- 
ished, in kind, by a dense fog — symbolic of the passion which blinds the 
eyes of the wrathful. The fog is bitter as smoke and black as night, and it 
is only in ecstatic vision that the angry souls are reminded of noble examples 
of forbearance, and of the murderous fruits of the opposite vice. The souls 
here suffering pray to the Lamb of God for mercy, and the beatitude that 
celebrates the completion of their purging is, "Blessed are the peacemakers." 

But we must hasten up the Mount. The Slothful are punished in the 
fourth terrace by being forced against their nature to run races with each 
other ; while they exercise the virtue opposite to their own failing by shout- 
ing out to each other shameful illustrations of luke-warmness and inspiring 
instances of diligence. Avarice, in the circle next above, is bound hand and 
foot ; and, as it has refused to look upward to higher good, so it is now made 
to grovel on the earth. "My soul clcaveth unto the dust," is the cry of the 
penitent; and "Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness" is the sign of their victory over this their besetting sin. Then comes 
the circle of the Gluttonous, tormented by the tree of Tantalus, a tree that 
entices by its wealth of fragrant fruits, but that widens upward instead of 
downward, and evermore withholds the means of gratification from the fam- 
ished soul. Haggard and emaciated, the gluttonous crowd about it, casting 
eager eyes upon its precious burden, but only to elicit from its branches 
urgent admonitions to temperance. In the seventh and last circle Lasciv- 
iousness is expiated by long lines of penitents who pass through a fierce 
flame proceeding from the rocky wall beside them. Dante and Virgil both 
enter into this flame. Only here, and in the third terrace where anger is 
punished, does Dante himself suffer with the penitents. Of two sins only, 
he seems to himself to need purging. And the penal fire does its work. His 
soul is purified from its last remaining sin. He is now master of himself, 
and, as a crowned and mitred sovereign, with the lost image of God restored, 
he enters the Terrestrial Paradise, the Eden from which man was expelled 
for his sin. Virgil now can no longer be his guide, and Beatrice comes to 
take Virgil's place, after Dante had drunk of the waters of Lethe, which 
extinguish the memory of the past, and of the waters of Eunoe, which bring 
back the memory of the good. 

Amid the living verdure and the fragrant flowers, the pleasant zephyrs 
and the singing birds, we would gladly linger. There are two remarks, 
however, which I must make with regard to Dante's Purgatory, before I 
leave it. And the first is that, like the Hell, Dante does not regard it as a 
place, so much as it is a process. Doubtless he believed in the place, and 
sought to give an imaginative picture of it. But much more he believed in 
the thing — the necessity of purification. "Without holiness no man can 
see the Lord;" "put to death the deeds of the flesh;" "cleanse yourselves, 
therefore, from all filthiness of the flesh and of the spirit," — these are the 
essential truths which were in Dante's mind. The Christian doctrine of 
sanctifieation is put into verse in Dante's poem, and so far, both Protestnnt 
and Romanist may find in it a source of great religious incitement and proiii. 



518 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

Indeed, the Purgatory comes nearer to our common life than either the Hell 
or the Paradise. The former is too far beneath us, and the latter is too far 
above. But every man can recognize resemblance to himself in the peni- 
tents of Purgatory, — that is, if he have even a spark of the hatred of sin 
and longing for holiness which God's regenerating Spirit has inspired. The 
tender and humble confessions of the sufferers, their submission to the 
divine chastisements, their eager appropriation of all helps to their restora- 
tion which are bestowed by the word or the Spirit of God, are full of sub- 
duing beauty. Nowhere in literature, outside of the Bible, have we so nobly 
portrayed ''the blessedness of him whose transgression is forgiven, and 
whose sin is covered." 

This first remark about Purgatory has had to do with that which Roman 
Catholicism and Protestantism have in common. My second remark has to 
do with the differences between them. There are two respects in which 
Protestants must regard Dante's representations as painfully erroneous. On 
the one hand he errs, as the Roman Catholic Church has erred, in extend- 
ing the period of purification beyond the confines of death. The literal 
interpretation is better. Purgatory is only on this earth, and in this life. 
"After death," there is, not purification, but "judgment." For multitudes, 
the Romanist doctrine is a doctrine of second probation. Men are content 
here with being at peace with the Church, while they are not yet at peace 
with God. The real controversy between themselves and their Judge is 
adjourned to the future world. Purgatory, with all its sufferings, becomes 
the basis of false hopes ; distant suffering is chosen rather than immediate 
renunciation of sin ; a fatal trust is put, in what the sinner can do by way of 
reparation, rather than in what Christ has done by way of atonement. And 
this leads me to notice another error intimately connected with that which I 
have just mentioned, and which Protestants must ever most strenuously 
oppose. I refer now to Dante's error in making the process of purification 
a penal one. If there be any truth of Scripture more vital and precious than 
another it is that of the completeness of Christ's sacrifice. Our sins, and all 
of them, were "laid on him;" he "has redeemed us from the curse of the 
law, being made a curse for us;" "there is therefore now no condemnation 
to them who are in Jesus Christ." God chastises his children; but it is in 
love, and it is for their good. There is no anger and there is no penalty, 
since "Jesus paid it all, all the debt we owe, and nothing either great or 
small remains for us to do." The notion that the sufferings and calamities 
of the present life are of the nature of punishment, is contrary to the whole 
doctrine of the New Testament, and constitutes "a bridge to the Roman 
Catholic doctrine of purgatorial fires." Neither in this world, nor in the 
world to come, can any mortal add, by penance of his own, to the efficacy of 
that sacrifice of Christ which was offered once for all. Dante was not in 
advance of his age, nor was he yet possessed of the spirit of the Lutheran 
Reformation. Justification by faith alone had not yet dawned upon him as 
God's only way of salvation. The "mass" to him was still a repetition of 
Christ's death, and the pains of Purgatory, voluntarily endured by the peni- 
tent, were still needed to supplement what Christ had done upon the cross. 

So at last we come to Dante's Paradise, a creation in some respects loftier 
Uid more wonderful than either the Hell or the Purgatory, yet, for the very 






DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 519 

reason that it is so lofty and wonderful, less attractive than either of these to 
the ordinary mind. Still, as we read the poet's sublime meditations upon the 
greatest truths of religion and philosophy, we are impressed with the self- 
sufficiency of his genius. Never, even in its highest soaring, does the wing 
of his imagination seem to flag. Or, if ever earthly pictures seem to fail 
and earthly words are incapable of expressing the "exceeding and eternal 
weight of glory," piety and worship furnish what art cannot supply, and 
the glowing heart of the poet shows itself most manifestly lost in adoration 
and in joy. Heaven, we must remember, is to Dante's mind the state of 
the perfected will ; or, rather, the state of the will that has been freed at 
length from earthly and sensual desires. But while perfection in the sense 
of sinlessness belongs to all the inhabitants of the blessed realm, perfection 
in the sense of capacity is ever enlarging. All are as full as they can hold 
of the love and purity of God, yet one can hold more than another. To 
use the mediaeval illustration: "A king may clothe all his children equally 
with cloth of gold, yet the amount of the cloth apportioned to each may 
vary according to their size." In heaven, too, as well as in the lower 
realms, each soul goes to his own place. 

Outward surroundings are simply the fit accompaniments and evidences 
of character. As the soul laden with sin experiences a downward, so the 
soul possessed of purity experiences an upward, gravitation ; and each one 
can say with King Richard in Shakespeare's play: "'Mount, mount, my soul, 
— thy seat is up on high!" As we press upward then from one heavenly 
sphere to another, we are to remember that we are not among the race of 
sinners any longer, — we are rather among those whose varying native gifts, 
and whose varying degrees of faithfulness in the exercise of those gifts, con- 
stitute an ever-varying receptivity for the life and love of God. 

Beatrice, the symbol of heavenly wisdom, is now Dante's guide. As he 
gazes upon her face, the light of the terrestrial paradise is lost in another 
light. "Suddenly day seemed added unto diy, as if Omnipotence had lit 
up the sky with another sun." The poet is lifted up from earth to heaven. 
And yet it is the lowest heaven which first he visits — the heaven of the 
moon, with its waxing and waning, the proper home of those whose wills 
on earth were imperfect through instability. Here are nuns, who, being 
constrained to marry, did not return to their vows when they had oppor- 
tunity. This sphere is revolved by the Angels. The next sphere is that of 
Mercury, and Archangels have it in charge, turning it in due order around 
the earth and the sphere of the moon which it encloses. In this sphere 
of Mercury abide those whose wills were on earth imperfect through love of 
fame — men of great activity and eloquence, who lived on the whole for 
God, yet at the same time had some regard to the praise of men. Then 
comes the sphere of Venus, revolved by the Principalities, and fitly made 
the home of those whose wills on earth were imperfect through excess of 
human love, even though that love was in itself lawful. Here Dante is led to 

" admire the Art that turns to good 
Such passion, and the Wisdom manifold 
Whence earthly love by heavenly is subdued." 

Here in this chief light of the material universe, I am happy to observe 
Thence he is lifted to the Sun. the fourth heaven, revolved by the Powers. 



520 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

that he places the abode of doctors of divinity and philosophy, proDably 
because they have themselves been sources of light to the Church. The 
sphere of Mars, to which the poet next ascends, Is revolved by the Vir- 
tues. Here he sees the forms of distinguished warriors, confessors, and 
martyrs for the faith, not drawn up in the order of an earthly army but 
ranged together in the shape of a cross. Then comes the sphere of Jupiter, 
of which the Dominations have control. Here rulers eminent for justice 
are disposed in the shape of an eagle; and wonderful to tell, the Eagle, 
collective representation of earth's noblest kings and potentates, itself finds 
a voice, and speaks to Dante of the greater things of the divine kingdom. 
In the planet Saturn, or seventh heaven, revolved by the Thrones, are 
found contemplative spirits, or those who have furnished the most illustrious 
examples of the monastic life. The cold sphere of Saturn is peculiarly 
adapted to the monks and hermits who have resigned the warmth of the 
fireside and the fervors of civic life, in order to give themselves to prayer 
and to the study of heavenly truth. The heaven of the fixed stars comes 
next, for Dante knew of no planet beyond Saturn. Here the Cherubim 
move the sphere, and the apostles and saints of the Old and of the New- 
Testaments have their dwelling. And here, before he is permitted to ascend 
higher, Dante passes an examination on the subject of Faith, Hope and Love, 
— St. Peter, St. James and St. John successively conducting it. When he 
has shown himself expert in these prerequisites to heavenly bliss, the poet 
is carried up to the ninth, or highest heaven, revolved by the Seraphim. 
This sphere is called the Primum Mobile, because its motion is most rapid. 
and is the cause of motion to all the spheres which it encloses. This highest 
heaven is starless and crystalline; and here "the nine orders of the celestial 
hierarchy circle in fiery rings around the Light which no man can approach 
unto, manifested as an Atomic Point." 

Dante has reached the summit of being, and is permitted to gaze upon 
its uncreated Source. A stream of light proceeds from God himself. In 
that light the multitude of saints and angels find their blessedness. 

" And as a cliff looks down upon the bed 

Of some clear stream, to see how richly crowned 

With flowers and foliage is its lofty head, 
So all from earth who hither e'er returned. 

Seated on more than thousand thrones around, 
Within the Eternal Light themselves discerned." 

Tt is the "Rose of the Blessed" — the great company of the redeemed, 
circling, like the petals of a rose, rank beyond rank, around the mystical 
lake of light which reflects that "Light which no man hath seen or can 
see." The saints of all ages are here, from Adam to St. Paul, and from the 
Virgin Mary to Beatrice. All the praises which Dante has hitherto lavished 
upon the lady of his love fail now, he says, to give any adequate conception 
of her loveliness, as with him she ascends to the highest heaven. But his 
love is now no merely earthly love, — he has learned the lesson that "our 
loves in higher love endure." Love for God draws him nearer to Beatrice, 
and conversely, love for Beatrice draws him nearer to God. His eyes, and 
all eyes, are supremely set on the Highest of all — the triune God, — into 
partnership with whom our humanity has been taken, in the person of the 
Son, and whose Trinity in Unity is now unfolded to the adoring contempla- 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 521 

tion of his creatures. At the intercession of St. Bernard, Dante is enabled 
with purified sight to gaze directly upon the Supreme Jehovah, and is moved 
to pray that grace may be given him so to utter what he sees, that genera- 
tions to come may catch some glimpse of the sublime vision : 

" O sovereign Light ! who dost exalt thee high 

Above all thoughts that mortal may conceive, 
Recall thy semblance to my mental eye, 
And let my tongue record the wondrous story, 

That I to nations yet unborn may leave 
One spark at least of thy surpassing glory ! " 

But the light transcends all powers of description. Only one thing is made 
plain — and that the greatest thing of all — in God, Light and Love are one: 

" The glorious vision here my powers o'ercame : — 
But now my will and wish were swayed by Love — 
(As turns a wheel on every side the same) 
Love — at whose word the sun and planets move." 

So ends the Divine Comedy. The translation of Wright, which I have 
generally used because it best represents the rhythm and rhyme of the 
original, is in these last lines in one respect defective, — it does not put at 
the end the word with which Dante meant his poem to close. That word 
is the •'stars." With this word he ends the Inferno: 

" Emerging, we once more beheld the stars." 
With this word he ends the Purgatorio: 

" And with a will endued to mount the stars.'* 
With this word he ends also the Paradiso : 

" The Love that moves the sun and the other stars." 

We can now see how narrow and unintelligent that criticism is which 
represents Dante's poetry as savage and grotesque, and regards the poet as 
capable only of rough effects. The truth is that Dante is of all poets the 
most sensitive to the changeful aspects of nature ; every hour of the day or 
the night has to him its peculiar beauty ; no poet ever read in the book of 
nature more spiritual lessons; no poet ever expressed those lessons in more 
varied and melodious phrase. When the boys of the street saw him go by, 
they said: "There goes the man that was in Hell!" — and there was in his 
countenance a solemn gravity which gave verisimilitude to the popular 
report. But Dante did not revel in horrors, as some imagine. It was his 
instinct of righteousness, and not a morbid disposition to gloat over suffer- 
ing, that furnished the animus of his dark descriptions of the torments of the 
lost. He had an enthusiasm for justice, — but then he had also a soul trem- 
ulously sensitive to the least of earth's sorrows, and to all those benignant 
agencies by which God would remedy them. Dante was thorough-going. 
He saw the depth of man's need ; he saw the grandeur of the heavenly disci- 
pline. He did not waste his fervors on sin or sinners ; he reserved those for 
struggling purity, and for God's plan of rescue and restoration. Dante is 
the most ethical of poets, — he measures all things by the standard of the 
Sanctuary. But all beauty that is real or lasting — all moral beauty, in short 
— wakes in Dante's soul responsive emotions, and finds a calm and sweet 
expression in his verse. 

Take for example the poet's ruling conception of heaven. It is that of 



522 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

light — light qualified by love. No language upon earth has such a marvel- 
ous wealth of terms expressive of the varying shades and aspects of light 
as has the Italian. And the most of these it owes to Dante. He not only 
pressed into service every word his native Italian furnished, but he revived 
scores of words which slept in the Latin classics; and, when these would 
not suffice, he coined yet others from the mint of his own brain. This 
was no fanaticism of sensuous delight; it was the struggle of a great nature 
to express moral truth through the poor vehicle of human speech. There 
rang forever in his ears that sounding and sublime sentence: "'God is 
light, and in him is no darkness at all." In the Paradise, when all other 
earthly images fail him to describe the state of the redeemed, he represents 
their blessedness under the figure of ever-new intensities and splendors of 
the light. The saints are "light in the Lord"; they have "awaked, and 
risen from the dead, and Christ has given them light." So the 'light" Is 
the light of truth, of purity, of holiness — the opposite to that "'darkness," 
which is error and impurity and sin. As God himself is light, and dwells 
in the light which is unapproachable, so each successive rise in the scale of 
being is a rise from one degree of light to another, — not a merely physical 
and passive elevation either, since it is the mind and heart and will into 
which and through which "the true light now shineth." No Mohammedan 
Paradise is here, but only the Paradise which consists in holiness and in 
likeness to God. The poet who could thus resist the sensuous and exter- 
nalizing influences of the Church of his day must not only have drunk deep 
of a nobler than Pierian spring — even the well of Holy Scripture — but 
must have been specially guided and enlightened by the Holy Spirit of God. 
In another respect Dante's Paradise is worthy of the highest praise. It 
represents nearness to God and service to God's creatures as contempo- 
raneous. Rank in God's creation is determined by the clearness of the soul's 
vision of God — here the mystical and contemplative element in religion 
has its rights accorded to it. But the ascetic exaggerations of this truth. 
which had so infected the life of the Church, Dante is almost wholly a 
stranger to. He writes from the point of view, not of the monk, but of the 
common Christian. Exceedingly few of the so-called saints of the Roman 
Catholic calendar does he deign to notice; the more healthful Scriptural 
examples of chastity and faith and endurance are strewn thickly over his 
pages. And then, most remarkable of all, he has made the nine heavens, 
with all their higher and lower spheres, only the working-places of tht 
redeemed ; while their working-places are below, their dwelling-places are 
on high, in the mystical White Rose which is above all time and space, 
around the mystical lake of light, where there is no need of sun or moon, 
because God and the Lamb are the light of it. All the saints dwell in the 
light of God's immediate presence, and according to their capacity are made 
to reflect that light. But just in proportion to the light which they are able 
to receive, just in proportion to their nearness to God and the clearness of 
their vision of him, is the service they are permitted to render others. At 
the same time that they worship above, they have an existence and perform 
a service in the universe of time and space. The highest of them can help 
God's creatures in the heaven of the fixed stars; the lowest of them can 
help those who are just beginning their course in the heaven of the moon. 



DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 523 

It is not worth our while to stop hero and smile at Dante, until we ponder 
those words of our Lord from which the poet, it may be, derived the 
suggestion of his thought: "See that ye despise not one of these little 
inn's, for in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father 
which is in heaven." What is this but to s;iy : Heaven and earth are not 
mutually exclusive? Angels — and if angels, why not redeemed men? — by 
so much as they are near to God, by so much do they busy themselves in 
service to God's creatures. Heaven is no refuge of idleness ; no hands 
hang down, and no lips are dumb. ''His servants shall serve him." 
Knowledge of God and service to men are contemporaneous and interde- 
pendent. The nearer we get to God, the larger shall be our sphere of 
loving activity ; the more shall we resemble him, who, though he was the 
very son of God and in the very bosom of the Father, yet was among us 
"as one that serveth." 

So holiness is joined to love, and holiness and love together constitute 
Dante's heaven. It is beautiful to see how, in the Paradise, all heaven 
rejoices over the new joy of each victorious and ascending spirit, and how 
increasing nearness to God brings its inhabitants ever nearer to each other. 
Even the ministrants in the upper temple get new understanding of the 
wonders of God's grace, and take on a new brightness of holy love, as they 
see Dante enter heaven. It was with such thoughts as these that the exile 
soothed the long years of his poverty and disappointment. Who can 
wonder that to him the spiritual world became at last more real than the 
material world that was open to his senses! It is sometimes made matter 
of complaint against him that his representations were so matter of fact; 
that his journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven was so real a journey ; 
that its incidents were so like the incidents of actual experience. Ah, this 
is the wonder and the poetry of it ! Imagination and piety created a new 
world. Just so did John Bunyan, in Bedford jail, turn from the earthly 
to the heavenly, from the seen to the unseen, from the temporal to the 
eternal. He not only saw Christian making his way from the City of De- 
struction to the Heavenly City, but he teas Christian. So Dante's vividness 
of description is not mere literary art; it is a deeper process than that, — it 
is a living through the things which he described, so that he could say: 
Quorum magnaque pars fui. 

It is this intense realism which gives the Divine Comedy its chief power. 
It is the utterance of the greatest man of his time, and one of the greatest 
men of all times. It is his conscientious and God-fearing attempt to express 
the truth of God as his generation apprehended it, and so to express it that 
it might influence all after ages to turn from error and iniquity to truth and 
righteousness. Thomas Carlyle has called Dante "the mouth-piece of the 
middle ages." The German Tieck declares that in him "ten silent centuries 
found a voice." This seems high praise, but Dante deserves higher praise 
than this. He is the mouth-piece, not only of the middle ages, but of all 
ages. Not twelve centuries, but all the centuries, find a voice in him. He 
illustrates truths that are true, not only then, but now and always — truths 
of sin and purgation and recovery to righteousness, truths for the expression 
of which God spread the floor of the universe with its mosaic of constella- 
tions, and caused the curtain of night and chaos to rise at the creation. 



524 DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY. 

"The corruption of the will, the purification of the will, the perfection of 
the will" — these are Dante's themes; and, as they are the greatest themes 
of all, so they are themes the most deeply affecting and the most 
permanently inspiring. Like Mary's breaking of the alabaster box, this 
offering of Dante to Beatrice, wherever the gospel goes, will be spoken of 
for a memorial of her. But it will be a memorial of something higher 
still, even of that higher love which spoke through the love of Beatrice, 
the love of the Triune God to a humanity that was sunk and lost in its sin. 
For this reason the poem of Dante will never die. Dante's universe has 
changed. In the midst of the Western hemisphere modern discovery has 
found, not the Mount of Purgatory, but a vast new continent. Our earth 
is no longer the centre of the solar system, — it is a satellite of the sun 
instead. But the great truths of being — these remain just what they 
were in Dante's time; and the Divine Comedy will be immortal, because it 
is the grandest utterance yet given by man to these universal and funda- 
mental principles in the nature of man and the nature of God. 



XLIX. 
POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING: 



It Is a serious question whether this article would ever hare been written, 
If I had not awhile ago seen Robert Browning — not in the flesh, but in the 
Watts Collection. I do not refer to the Collection of Isaac Watts, valuable 
as that collection is, but to that of George Frederick Watts, who puts his 
poetry upon canvas instead of coining it into song. Many critics regard this 
particular Watts as the best modern reviver of the color and the ideality of 
the Venetian masters. A considerable number of his pictures were exhibited 
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There was "Love and Death" — a 
rosy boy, with appealing look, vainly striving to press back from the thresh- 
old a veiled and sombre boy that trampled under his feet the flowers 
falling from Love's fingers. There was 'Love and Life" — a noble, mas- 
culine figure helping a fainting maiden along a rocky, precipitous path, the 
lesson being this, that life cannot get on without love. There was "Time, 
Death, and Judgment" — Time, an immortal youth; Death, a solemn, dusky 
shape ; both wading through a deep stream, while Judgment, with flaming 
sword, followed close behind. 

These three were all of them great pictures — great because they bodied 
forth ideal truth and gave it power over the heart. But the portraits of the 
Collection were more impressive still. The realistic method was never more 
rigidly applied. Each subject was treated in its own way. The artist had 
seized the central feature of each personality, and had set it forth so vividly 
and powerfully that the living man stood revealed before you in lineaments 
never to be forgotten. There was Lord Lawrence, a swarthy face against a 
lurid background, as if just emerging from the smoke and flame and blood 
of the Indian Mutiny. There was Sir Frederick Leighton, President of the 
Royal Academy, all elegance and jollity, as if he cared not a fig whether his 
special school of painting kept or not. There was John Stuart Mill, cold 
and intellectual, as if meditating whether in some distant star like Sirius 
two and two might not possibly make five. There was John Lothrop Mot- 
ley, the very pink of a literary aristocrat. There was Cardinal Manning, all 
scarlet and lace, all dignity and devotion, but with an ascetic air that seemed 
to say he had not had a good meal of victuals since he entered the Roman 
Church. There was Thomas Carlyle, biting through his under-lip for very 
groutiness. There was Swinburne, a pert little counter-jumper, with red 
hair flying all abroad, as if he had just received a shock of electricity. There 
was Alfred Tennyson, with melancholy and self -consciousness only slightly 
relieved by the remembrance of his elevation to the House of Lords. And 



•A Lecture delivered at Wellesley College, May, 1886; printed in the 
Examiner, December, 1887. 



526 rOETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

there, finally, was Robert Browning, healthy, robust, sagacious, subtle ; 
seemingly a large-minded cotton-manufacturer rather than a retail vender 
of "Red-cotton Night-caps"; with good humor, knowledge of affairs, insight 
into character, determination to express what he saw; but as for "the soul 
of melody," "singing as the bird sings," or anything sensuous, sentimental, 
or purely artistic, why it was simply not there. Philosopher, critic of life, 
man of the world? Yes. But, poet? Well, if so, not 'one of the common 
sort. Not Tennyson's "The poet in a golden clime was born," but Emer- 
son's "The free winds told him what they knew," is the verse to describe 
him. Yet when I saw the portrait, I felt that I had new light thrown upon 
all that Browning ever wrote. The man interpreted his work. I recog- 
nized a new species of the genus 'poet' — one who has made a sort of poetry 
so entirely his own that we shall have to pull down our barns and build 
greater, or else construct an Annex to our old scheme of classification, in 
order to make room for him and take him in. 

That Robert Browning is a great writer, the story of his life sufficiently 
demonstrates. Born in 1812, he was graduated at the London University 
before reaching the age of twenty. He then spent some years south of tin- 
Alps, rummaging about in the libraries of old monasteries and inspecting 
the pictures of old cathedrals, till Walter Savage Lander could truly say that 
Browning never strikes a false note when he treats of Italy. Pauline was 
his first printed, poem; Paracelsus, published in 1S3G, his first tragedy. 
His Strafford was represented upon the stage, and failed, though Macread\ 
took the principal role, in 1837. He married Elizabeth Barrett in 1S46, and 
Mrs. Browning died in 1861. During all these and the following years Mr. 
Browning has been a prolific writer. As many as ten thick volumes attest 
his industry. Yet he has never caught the popular ear, — he has never tried 
to catch it. His productions have had to make their way against storms of 
criticism, but they have been read by a continually increasing number of 
thoughtful people. Whatever the student of literature may think of Brown- 
ing, he must take account of the fact that never before was there a writer of 
verse for the study of whose writings during his life-time clubs were formed 
in every large city of both hemispheres — the proceedings of some of these 
clubs being regularly published, like the transactions of learned societies. 
Here is at least a literary phenomenon. There are two possible explanations : 
Either Robert Browning is a plausible pretender, or he is a great poet. Is 
Robert Browning a great poet? Well, "that depends." We must know 
what poetry is, and what Robert Browning is. I shall treat my reader, 
therefore, to a definition of poetry which, however defective in other respects 
it may be, will, at least, have the merit of being brand new. I shall then 
weigh Robert Browning in these new balances, and see whether he is found 
"wanting. 

Poetry is the imaginative reproduction of the universe, in its ideal rela- 
tions, and the expression of these relations in rhythmical literary form. The 
meaning of this definition will more fully appear if we say concretely that 
the poet is, first, a creator; secondly, an idealizer; and, thirdly, a literary 
artist. Take the first of these. There is a creative element in all true poetry. 
The poet is etymologically a "maker," not in the sense in which God is the 
Maker of all, but in the secondary sense, that he shapes into new forms the 



POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 527 

material made ready to his hand. Browning has himself furnished us with 
a noble description of this office of the imagination : 

" I find first 
Writ down for very A B C of fact: 
' In the beginning God made heaven and earth.* 

Man — as befits the made, the inferior thing- 
Repeats God's process, in man's due degree. 
Attaining man's proportionate result; 

Creates? no, but resuscitates, perhaps 

For such man's feat is, in the due degree. 
Mimic creation, galvanism for life — 
But still a glory portioned in the scale." 

Still further on in the same work from which we have quoted (The Ring 
and the Book, I: 706-741), the author compares this manipulation of fact 
by the imagination to the adding of alloy when the gold is made into a ring. 
We must remember, however, that this creative function is to be clearly 
distinguished from that power of the mind which merely recalls the past. 
The reproductive faculty is not simply the representative faculty. Imagi- 
nation is not memory. Every woman can write one novel ; she remembers 
one story — her own, and she can tell that. But ''the vision and the faculty 
divine" that can evolve a hundred stories, all true to life and throbbing with 
emotion, how rare a thing is this ! Byron shows the narrowness of his cre- 
ative powers, when everywhere, on the Alps or on the Rhine, in Greece, or 
Spain, or Italy, he sees only himself, — Manfred and Giaour, Childe Har- 
old, and Don Juan, are all Byron, under different names and various thin 
disguises. Not so with Shakespeare. The greatness of the master appears 
in nothing so much as in this, that in Shakespeare you see everybody and 
everything, but Shakespeare himself. So Browning hides his own person - 
'ality. Only twice that I remember, in all his writings, does he speak in his 
own name; first, in that magnificent tribute to his living wife, One Word 
More; and, secondly, at the close of his Introduction to The Ring and 
the Book, in which he almost apotheosizes his wife, now dead. There is 
indeed a couplet in the opening lines of The Inn Album, which reads : 

"That bard's a Browning! he neglects the form: 
But ah, the sense, ye gods, the weighty sense ! " 

But even here Browning is not speaking in the first person, — in fact, it is 
not Browning who is speaking at all, but rather one of Browning's dramatis 
persona, though it is of Browning that he speaks. It still remains true that 
Browning deals with the non-ego, not with the ego in the sense of self. 

I have called poetry the imaginative reproduction of the universe. But I 
have not meant to limit the word "universe" to its technical theological 
meaning. I have meant it to include all, even God himself. Only by giv- 
ing to the term this infinite sweep of significance, do we gain the proper 
conception of the dignity of poetry. It is nothing less than the reproduc- 
tion to the imagination, of all being, all beauty, all truth — in short, of all 
things visible or invisible. The high praises of God are its noblest province, 
but all the world of finite things is its province also. To reproduce all this 
to the imagination would require an infinite mind, and the result would be 
the poetry of the ages, the poetry of eternity. If this be the meaning of tho 



528 POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

word "universe," then it is certain that no mortal poet can compass it. 
Hence the poet must make his choice ; he must divide, in order to conquer. 
It is not to his discredit that he takes a limited field, provided within those 
limits he "holds the mirror up to uature" and shows us the essential truth 
of things. In order to judge Browning justly, then, we must ask what range 
he has assigned himself, and whether within that range he shows himself 
possessed of a great creative imagination. 

The most obvious thing to be said about Browning's genius is that he is 
the poet, not of nature, but of man, Wordsworth was the poet of nature. 
To him the world was sacred, because symbolic, and interfused with a divine 
element. The "light of setting suns," and "the billows rolling evermore" 
— these kindled his poetic imagination. 

" To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

" The meadow, grove and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight, 

To me did seem 
Apparelled in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream." 

Now all this affords the utmost contrast to Browning's poptry. I douht 
whether sentiments like these can be found in all the dozen solid volumes 
that bear his name. Browning and Wordsworth both deal with common 
things ; but Wordsworth treats of nature, Browning of life. The latter could 
adopt Pope's line, "The proper study of mankind is man." And in the 
introduction to Bordello, where our author has most clearly indicated the 
direction of his literary ambition, he says in plain prose: "My stress lay on 
the incidents in the development of a soul." 

Again, Browning is the poet, not of events, but of thoughts. He cares, 
not so much for the result, as for the process. He describes, not so much 
incidents, as people's impressions of them. Some might perhaps think that 
in the Bringing of the Good News from Ghent to Aix, we had at least 
one exception to this rule ; but even here, the interest lies not so much in 
the ride as in the rider ; not so much in the redoubtable steed as in the fiery 
determination that spurred him on ; not so much in the deliverance itself as 
in the thoughts of the deliverer. Rarely, if ever, has this writer's verse any 
tinge of the objective, much less of the epic. On the other hand, he lets us 
into the secrets of the heart. As he sets before us Bishop Blougram's 
Apology for holding great ecclesiastical preferments while all real faith in 
the doctrines he was set to defend has gone out of him, we see "all the 
recesses and windings of an acute but mean and peddling little soul." As 
we hear the duke calmly describe his . villainous treatment of My Last 
Duchess, it is difficult to say which we most shudder at, the speaker's icy 
cruelty, or his unconsciousness of it. No poet has more clearly taught that 
"out of the heart are the issues of life," and that "as a man thinketh, so is 
he." No poet has more powerfully depicted the self -perpetuating sin of the 
thoughts, or has given more impressive illustrations of the necessity of 
"bringing every thought into captivity," if we would make the least pre- 
tense to virtue. 

Once more, Browning's poetry is, not lyric, but dramatic. He does not 



POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 529 

himself describe men's thoughts, but he makes men describe their own. In 
one of his poems he rebukes a brother poet for "speaking naked thoughts, 
instead of draping them in sights and sounds." In the Spanish Cloister, 
the malicious, cursing monk involuntarily sets before us the character and 
life of the gentle and kindly brother whom he hates; so that, though the 
latter never utters a word for himself, the very cursing of his enemy becomes 
his justification and his monument. The little poem entitled Confessions 
contains a startling revelation of the heart. It is the last words of a dying 
man. He will have nothing to do with the clergyman who comes to give 
him spiritual consolation. He fastens his eyes on the medicine-bottles upon 
the table, and his imagination turns even them into a picture of a darling 
sin of his youth, and gloats over the remembered transgression, even though 
the next moment is to usher him into the presence of God. All this reminds 
me of a historical incident related by Mrs. Charles, in her book entitled 
The Diary of Kitty Trevylyan. John Nelson, the Methodist preacher of 
England, was converted by means of a dream. He saw the great while 
throne set, and the myriads gathered of earth and heaven. The Judge sat 
silent, but before him was an open book. Up to that book came one by one 
in long procession every soul of all mankind, and as each advanced he tore 
open his breast as a man would tear open the bosom of his shirt, aud then 
compared his heart with the commandments written in the book. Not a 
word was said, nor did the Judge lift his finger; but each man, according 
as his heart agreed or disagreed with that perfect standard, went with joy 
to the company of the saved, or in despair to the company of the damned. 
Sin became its own detecter and judge and tormentor. So, as we read Robert 
Browning, we become aware that a process of self-revelation is going on. 
We seem to have naked souls before us. We look into the heart of man, and 
into the Day of Judgment. 

Now, granting to our author his peculiar and chosen department, namely, 
man; his aspect of that segment of the universe, namely, thought; and, 
finally, his method of treatment, the dramatic ; we ask once more, Is Brown- 
ing a great creative genius? I think no one who has attentively and sym- 
pathetically read such poems as Karshish, Andrea del Sarto, The Flight 
of the Duchess, Dis AUter Visum, The Statue and the Bust, By the 
Fireside, Master Ungues, Evelyn Hope, can refrain from answering in 
the affirmative. But none of these, after all, give more than fragmentary 
evidences of his power. The greatest work of Robert Browning is unques- 
tionably The Ring and the Book. A sort of personality invests this 
acknowledgment of mine, and I make it partly by way of reparation, for 
fifteen years ago I began to read this production of the poet, but allowed 
myself to be daunted by the roughness and obscurity of its opening pages. I 
threw it down, determined to read no more. For ten years I kept my vow. 
Beginning then with something easier, I found to my surprise that Browning 
was comprehensible. A summer vacation devoted to The Ring and the Book 
converted me to a qualified admirer of the poet. Now, after further study 
of his writings, I regard this poem as the greatest work of creative imagi- 
nation that has appeared since the time of Shakespeare. 

I wish to justify this statement, which to many will seem so extraordinary. 
I can only do so by briefly describing The Ring and the Book. It is 
34 



530 POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

founded upon the story of an old Italian murder. Couut Guido, after hav- 
ing passed his youth in the service of the Pope, and having failed to secure 
the advancement that he sought, determines in disgust to retire to his 
dilapidated castle and his ancestral estate. He bethinks him, however, that 
an addition to his meagre income will be desirable, and he manages, with 
that end In view, to marry the reputed daughter of an aged and well-to-do 
couple of the middle class, and to take her with him. Her parents follow 
her, and, being ill-treated by him, leave his house in wrath. They then 
make known the fact that their reputed daughter is no daughter of theirs, 
but the offspring of a courtesan. Count Guido, in revenge, pursues toward 
his wife a course of relentless cruelty. He would drive her from him, yet 
in such a way as to throw the blame on her. A young priest Is filled with 
pity for this double victim of avarice and malice — so young, so pure, so 
miserable — and he helps her to escape and to make her way to her so-called 
father's house in Rome. Thither Count Guido pursues her, and on a 
certain Christmas Eve bursts in with hired assassins, and fatally stabs the 
father, the mother, and herself. The Count is apprehended, tried, and 
executed, 

It is this story upon which Browning has rung the changes in The Ring 
and the Book. First, we have the bare facts narrated — 1,400 lines. 
Secondly, we have the story as one-half of Rome tells it, said one part taking 
the part of the husband — 1,500 lines. Thirdly, what the other half of Rome 
said, taking the side of the wife — 1,700 lines. Fourthly, Tertium Quid — 
what the few, the elite, the cultured, the Cardinals said — 1,600 lines. 
Fifthly, what Count Guido himself said — 2,000 lines. Sixthly, what the 
brave young priest said, who fled with the Count's wife — 2,100 lines. Sev- 
enthly, what the young wife herself said, during the short hours between 
the attack and her death — 1,800 lines. Eighthly, what the counsel for the 
defense said at the trial — 1,800 lines. Ninthly, what the counsel for the 
prosecution said at that same trial — 1,600 lines. Tenthly, what the Pope 
said, to whom the case was referred for final decision — 2,100 lines. Elev- 
enthly, what Count Guido said in prison before he was beheaded — 2.400 
lines. Twelfthly, what the world said when all was over — 900 lines. 

A most audacious and weary specimen of literary trifling, the reader will 
be apt to say. Not so. Each new telling of the story adds new incident and 
sheds new light. The effect is stereoscopic, — you see the facts from ever 
new points of view. Little by little the real truth is evolved from the chaos 
of testimony ; little by little the real motives of the actors become manifest. 
As the process goes on you catch yourself speculating about each of the 
dramatis personal, as if he were a character in real life. The complexity 
of human motive, the wonderful interaction of character and circumstance, 
the vastness of the soul — all these begin to dawn upon you. Men are both 
better and worse than they know; only God can judge the heart. I know 
of no poem in all literature in which the greatness of human nature so looms 
up before you, or which so convinces you that a whole heaven or a whole 
hell may be wrapped up in the compass of a single soul. And, as for the 
separate figures, I know not where to find characters more original or more 
distinct, than that of Guido, with a selfishness that makes sun, moon, and 
stars revolve about him, and when foiled, turns to desperate malignity ; or 



POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 531 

Pompilla, the white lily grown out of the horse-pond scum, unstained even 
in the midst of cruelty and misery; or Caponsacchi, the pleasure-loving soul, 
turned to a hero by one resolve of daring and self-sacrifice ; or the grand old 
Pope, rounding out a just life, and preparing to go before God's judgment- 
bar, by doing one last act of justice and judgment upon earth. There are 
those who think this poem great only In its length, — and it cannot be denied 
that it gives the impression of inexhaustible fertility. But such critics can 
scarcely have read the poem through. The learning, the thought, the gen- 
eral conception — these are as remarkable as the length ; and taking them 
all together, I am persuaded that the generations to come will regard The 
Ring and the Book, in the mere matter of creative genius, as the greatest 
poetical work of this generation. 

The strongest and most flattering thing that can be said about Robert 
Browning has been said already. We have found him to possess in an 
eminent degree the first and most important characteristic of the true poet, 
creative genius. But there is a second standard by which he must he tried. 
Is the idealizing element as highly developed in him? Poetry is the imagi- 
native reproduction, not of the actual, but of the ideal universe. The great 
poetj then, must be able to idealize. His imagination, creative though it 
may he. must not find its affinities in the bad, the morally indifferent, or 
the merely actual. It must hold high converse with the true, the beautiful, 
and the good. The poet must be one of 

" The immortal few 
Who, to the enraptured soul and ear and eye, 
Teach beauty, virtue, truth, and love, and melody." 

Let me make this plain by a few contrasts. Imagination is not enough 
to make a poet. I once had a classmate who had a vivid imagination, — the 
trouble was that his imagination all ran to snakes. Of words descriptive of 
creeping and slimy things — centipedes, scorpions, and toads — he had a 
rare supply ; and the imaginative power displayed in his occasional objurga- 
tions was something impressive. But I never called him a poet. Somewhat 
similarly, there is an imagination that runs by instinct to the morally bad, 
that seems to love the low and the vile for its own sake ; or, if not this, is 
possessed with the notion — a notion born of a pantheistic philosophy — that 
everything that is has a sort of sacredness and value, and therefore is to be 
faithfully represented in literature. And so we have Zola's studies of morbid 
anatomy, and his minute depicting of the festering plague-spots of humanity. 
Of a somewhat better sort are the novels of Henry James — novels with no 
moral purpose ; novels, in fact, that scout a moral purpose as foreign to true 
art. Mr. James seems to fancy that his business is simply to set before us 
studies of actual society and manners, — he would photograph modern life. 

I find the same moral indifferentism in George Eliot, — I can even trace 
the stream back to Goethe. George Eliot's description of Dinah, the 
Methodist preacher, would almost convince you that the author knew the 
blessedness of such a Christian experience and was writing of it out of her 
own heart. But soon she lapses from that high strain, and a critical word 
suggests to us that all this has been described only as a peculiar side or 
aspect of human life ; her interest in It is purely artistic and aesthetic, not the 



532 POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

warmth of real sympathy. So too in Wilhclm Meistcr — that "menagerie 
of tame creatures" — does Goethe, after taking his youthful charge through 
the sensualisms of the green-room and the strolling theatre, introduce him, 
as a necessary part of his education, to an example of exalted piety. The 
"Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," iuterjected into this immoral book, are 
simply proof that Goethe had no real belief in moral distinctions, and 
regarded evil as a necessary condition and accompaniment of the develop- 
ment of good. 

Now, in contrast to all this tendency in our modern literature, I stand for 
the thesis that poetry is not a mere representation of life. Pre-Raphaelite 
studies of nature are not worthy the name of poetry. Art is not photog- 
raphy, and photography is not art. The ideal element must be seized 
and exhibited, or we have no poetry. We want to see the good in low 
surroundings, and we want to see the evil, only as a foil and contrast to the 
good. "Poetry," as Ruskin has well said, "presents to us noble grounds 
for the noble emotions." We seek in poetry for the essential truth and 
beauty that lie at the heart of things. Bluer skies than those of Italy, 
brighter wit than that of Sydney Smith, higher thought than that of Plato 
—these we seek and expect in poetry. We look to her to lift us from the 
dull realm of the actual into the "great air" of the ideal. 

Of Browning as an idealizer, I cannot say so much as I said when I spoke 
of him as a creator. And yet a striking feature of his poetry is its recogni- 
tion of this higher element in human life. To him all men are in a true 
sense Ideal beings. There is a germ of greatness in every soul — continents 
that no Columbus has ever yet discovered — thoughts and motives, feelings 
and decisions, that possess interest beyond that of the whole material uni- 
verse. Browning would not have chosen for his subject the soul of man, 
if he had not sympathized with the dictum of Sir William Hamilton: "In 
the universe there is nothing great but man ; in man there is nothing great 
but mind." 

Idealization, however, to be of any value, requires the possession of right 
standards of judgment. The poet, therefore, must be able to see things in 
large relations, discern the universal in the particular, catch glimpses of the 
absolute truth and beauty in its minor manifestations. The greatest poetry 
is impossible except to a great philosopher. I know what prejudices I am 
encountering here, — still I believe that these prejudices originate in a 
mistaken and narrow view of what poetry is. If poetry is the imaginative 
reproduction of the universe in its ideal relations, then nothing human, 
nothing divine, can be foreign to the poet. He must know psychology, 
and ethics, and politics, and law; he must know the physical sciences, and 
he must be a theologian as well. Of course I do not mean that he must be 
a master in details; but this is certain, that the great poets have possessed 
themselves of the substance of the knowledge of their times. And this 
means that the great poet must be a man of broad mind, of deep sympathy — 
a great thinker and a great man. 

There are three things in particular which serve as standards in all ideali- 
zation, and which the great poet must rightly apprehend. He must, first 
of all, have a right view of human nature. He must believe in freedom and 
immortality. " No great poet was ever a fatalist." The poetry of mere fate 



POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 533 

denies man's consciousness, and fails to inspire. Emerson was better than 
his philosophy, when he wrote : 

" So near is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When duty whispers low, ' Thou must,' 
The youth replies, ' I can.' " 

How different from this is the writing of George Eliot, with her exaggeration 
of heredity ! To her, life is hut the working out of inborn tendencies. Man 
may struggle and he may pray, but his nature is too much for him at last. 
Those who have seen Elihu Tedder's illustrations of Omar Khayyam will 
remember the ever-recurring swirl that images human life ; the many threads 
that come, no man knows whence, — that go, no man knows whither ; the 
gathering of these threads for a moment into the knot of human conscious- 
ness, and then the scattering of that consciousness forever. No wonder that 
at that centre stands the wine-cup. It is the old philosophy of the brute : 
"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." 

Now, I say that with such a conception as this there can be no proper 
Idealization, and no poetry that will permanently touch the heart of mau. 
Life is not worth writing poetry about, for it has lost its dignity. The true 
poet believes less in environment, and more in will ; less in heredity, and 
more in freedom. Charles Kingsley has said that the spirit of the ancient 
tragedy was "man conquered by circumstance," while the spirit of the 
modern tragedy is "man conquering circumstance." But this is only partly 
true. Even the ancient tragedy had its Prometheus, with unconquerable 
will asserting his freedom, in spite of the thunderbolts and the vultures. 
And there is still more to be said. The thirst of conscience for reparation 
is the very essence of tragedy, whether ancient or modern. And this con- 
science witnesses to freedom in the past, and to an immortality of retribu- 
tion in the future. Poetry must take account of these facts in the nature of 
man, or it ceases to be poetry. Now, we claim for Robert Browning that he 
recognizes them. In his pages we read of human freedom, lxion is a poem 
worthy, for its spirit and its power, to be put side by side with the Prome- 
theus of JEschylus. In it, the victim, bound to his iron wheel, can still 
triumph over Jove. In Pippa PasseSj the innocent peasant-girl trips in 
simple gladness from scene to scene, singing as she goes : 

" God's in his heaven, 

All 's right with the world! " 

but her little song rouses conscience, makes vice seem hateful, reveals men 
to themselves. All unconsciously to herself, her words strike right and left 
■ — "a savor of life unto life, or of death unto death," and the result is two 
murders and three souls saved. I know of no poem since Macbeth that so 
portrays the agony of an awakened conscience. In this day of Hegelian 
revival, when moral evil and natural evil are confounded with each other, 
our literature needs to be invigorated by a fresh breeze from Dante, by 
Shakespeare's pictures of remorse, and by Robert Browning's illustrations 
of the terrors and retributions of man's own moral nature. 

If the poet must have proper views of human nature, it is yet more 
important that he should have proper views of the divine. He must recog- 
nize the fact that there is a God. A poet of whom it can be said that ' ' God 



534 POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

is not in all his thoughts," has missed the greatest thought of poetry, — for 
"the greatest thought of the finite is the Infinite." So Jean Paul has said, 
and Mr. Browning would adopt his phrase. Our author's writing is so full 
of this divine element that many a reader would fain call him a religious 
philosopher, if not a religious poet. We maintain that the highest poetry 
is impossible without religion, not only because the thought of God Is the 
most sublime and fruitful of thoughts, but because from this loftiest thought 
all our lower thoughts take their proper measure and color. He who has no 
sense of God can never look at finite things in their right proportions. He 
who does not see in God an infinite personality, righteousness, and love, can 
never interpret the world, with its sorrow and its sin. 

Browning believes in the personality and righteousness and love of God. 
He is at war indeed with the anthropomorphism which would degrade God to 
the level of human appetites and passions. His Caliban on Setcbos is a 
most scathing and convincing arraignment of superstitious and slavish wor- 
ship. The Epilogue, in which David stands as the type of the religion 
that confines God to place, and Renan as the type of the skepticism that 
gazes sensuously into heaven until the last star of faith grows dim and 
disappears, ends with Mr. Browning's own declaration of faith in an imma- 
nent Deity: 

" That one face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 
Become my universe that feels and knows." 

But that this is not pantheism, we are assured by other poems like Saul, 
in which, not content with an unmoral God, he declares that "all's Law, yet 
all's Love," and maintains that incarnation is the only true revelation. So 
Pompilia strikes the same note, when she says : 

" I never realized God's birth before — 
How he grew likest God in being born." 

FerislitaJi's Fancies, thought by some to be only a collection of slight 
poems, seems to me to be one of the most significant examples of the poet's 
irresistible tendency to the expression of religious ideas. In these slight 
poems I find the following subjects successively treated : 1. God works no 
unnecessary miracles. 2. Let us give thanks for actual blessings, though 
much that we desire may fail us. 3. Faith and love go together. 4. Pray 
on, though you see no answer to your prayers. 5. The purpose of suffering 
is purification. 6. The punishment of sin is dwarfing of nature. 7. Ascet- 
icism fails of its own end. 8. Love must go before knowledge. 9. Life is 
worth the living. — I think no one can read over this list without being 
convinced that here is a poet who believes in God as well as in the soul. 

But there are also relations between man and God upon which the poet 
must have definite opinions, if he would idealize aright. I have already 
referr d to Saul, by way of evidence that Browning's God is a personal 
God, a God of love, a God self-revealed and brought down to our human 
comprehension in the incarnate Christ. I wish to speak of this same poem 
as embodying the true idea of inspiration, and so in general, of the com- 
munications of God to man. I speak of this poem the more readily, because 
it is perhaps the most widely known and the most easily understood of 
Browning's longer productions, — the fittest of all, therefore, for a beginner 



POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 535 

to master. The title of the poem should be 'David," rather than "Saul," 
for the interest centres, not in Saul's hearing, but in David's song. The 
shepherd boy has been brought from the sheep-fold to chase away with music 
the abnormal and insane depression of Saul's spirit. David sings of nature 
and her beauty, but Saul is not moved. He celebrates Saul's own heroic 
deeds, but there is no response. David rises in spirit, as he sings; in love, 
he takes to himself Saul's sorrow ; and, as he does so, a Spirit greater than 
his own takes possession of the singer ; through his own love for his mon- 
arch, he is lifted up to understand something of the great love of God ; his 
human sympathy becomes the vehicle of prophecy ; in God himself he sees 
the desire to reveal himself in human form to men ; he looks into the far 
future, and cries: "See the Christ stand!" 

Is there any other poem than this that more fully and truly expresses the 
method of divine inspiration? Here is a using of human faculties and 
powers, of human heart and tongue, yet an elevation of all these to heights 
of understanding and expression which unaided humanity is powerless to 
reach. The supernatural uses the natural as its basis and starting-point, as 
its medium aud vehicle ; but it transcends the natural, opening to it the far 
reaches of prophetic vision, and attuning it to the melody of a heavenly 
song. I might speak of A Death in the Desert — an attempt to depict the 
last hours of St. John, and to illustrate how human nature, fainting and 
failing as it is, can hospitably receive and faithfully express the mind and 
will of the Spirit of God. But I find nowhere in Browning's writings any 
intimation that the gift of inspiration proper is to be confounded with the 
enlightenment of Christian men in general. He stops with the faith that 
"holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." And yet 
the obscure and the weak may be God's workmen still : 

*• All service ranks the same with God — - 
With God, whose puppets best and worst 
Are we: there is no last nor first." 

Alfred Tennyson has been called the religious poet of this century, appar- 
ently upon the ground of such poems as The Two Voices, The Vision ' of 
Sin, and In Memoriam. I dislike to shock the sensibilities of Tennyson's 
admirers ; but I wish to record my belief that there is far more of a healthy 
religious spirit in Browning, than in Tennyson. In the latter, underneath 
the faith, there is a generally hidden, but sometimes outcropping, skepticism ; 
so that I should hesitate to say whether his poetry had been quoted the more 
by the prophets of faith or the prophets of unbelief. This cannot be said 
of Browning. I do not read fragments of his writings in sermons preached 
for the purpose of criticising or denouncing the old faith. I do find him 
referred to in reverent discussions of the law and the attributes of God. I 
am inclined to commend the reading of Robert Browning to all preachers 
and theologians, as well as to all thoughtful Christian people. He is the 
most learned, stirring, impressive, literary teacher of our time ; but he is a 
religious philosopher as well. He has expressed himself upon a larger 
variety of problems, than any modern poet. He who would serve men's high- 
est interests, as secular or religious teacher, will find more of suggestion, 
more of illustration, more of stimulus, in Browning, than in any modern 
writer. To quote again from Walter Savage Landor: "His is the surest 



536 POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

foot, since Chaucer's, that has waked the echoes from the difficult places of 
pootr.v ami of lift'." 

I cannot leave this general subject of Browning's idealizing faculty, with- 
out fairly considering two objections to my doctrine, one directed against the 
seriousness, and the other against the healthfuluess, of his poetry. I grant 
that there is at times an apparent levity. This may sometimes be merely a 
sign that he is consciously master of his theme — so fully master that he can 
play with it. The cat plays with the mouse she has caught, — she does not 
care to play with the dog. But Browning himself has suggested a deeper 
and more constant reason than this. He has appropriated as motto for 
Fcrishtah'8 Fancies what Collier, in his edition of Shakespeare, says of 
that great master: "His genius was jocular, but when disposed he could be 
very serious." So we may say that it is the nature of Browning's genius to 
be jocular. 

Is jocularity incompatible with seriousness? "I am never merry when I 
hear sweet music," says Jessica in the Merchant of Venice. Why did Jesus 
never jest? Would he have seemed to us possessed of a larger and truer 
humanity, if the humorous element had appeared in him? It is common to 
say that our Lord's unique work of suffering and death involved unique and 
soul-crushing burdens, — for him to laugh would have been as incongruous 
as for us to laugh at a funeral. We sing: "He wept that we might weep." 
Is it not equally true to say: "He wept that we might smile?" Since 
"believing, we rejoice to see the curse removed," may we not maintain that 
an unhindered development of all parts of our nature is first rendered pos- 
sible by his death? I think no one can doubt that there is a provision in 
our nature for wit and jollity. Great men, with great cares, have solaced 
themselves with jests. We do not think either Socrates or Abraham Lincoln 
the less serious, because they were occasionally jocular. I will not venture 
to say that Browning is never guilty of seeming irreverence; but that this 
seeming irreverence has a really profane intent, would be hard to prove. In 
general, I think it is rather the bubbling up of a deep effervescent spring. 
It is part of his idealizing faculty to see things in their humorous relations. 
H'is jocularity, though sometimes carried to an extreme, is part of the 
large-mindedness of the man. 

And this opens the way to the discussion of the last objection. Is Robert 
Browning's poetry healthful in its influence? We must grant that there is 
a certain freedom about its treatment of man's physical instincts, which now 
and then may offend critics of the Tennysonian school. There is no asceti- 
cism in Browning. He does not attempt to do without the body, as Shelley 
did. But neither does he deify the body, as Swinburne does. Mens sana 
in corpore sano, is his motto. He believes in food and drink — but in food 
and drink mainly as means, not as ends. If he ever speaks of sensuous 
things with something of Elizabethan frankness, Ave must remember that 
there Is a mock-modesty more akin to vice than is mere freedom in speech. 
I find in Browning true sentiment, without a tinge of sentimentality. 

John Stuart Mill once defined sentimentality as "a setting of the sympa- 
thetic aspect of things above their aesthetic aspect, or above the moral aspect 
of them — their right or wrong." This was the fault of the early novels, 
like Richardson's Clarissa, which drew such oceans of tears from our great- 



POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 537 

great-grandmothers, but whose sickly and maudlin sentiment we only make 
merry over to-day. Now, I think it a great tribute to the healthfulness of 
Robert Browning's poetry, and so to his power of true idealization, wheu 
I say that, as for this mawkish sentimentality, he will have none of it. 
Wordsworth would have come nearer to being one of the greatest poets if 
he had not lacked one of his senses, — not one of the five senses, but that 
sixth, most important sense — the sense of the ludicrous. Browning's sense 
of the ludicrous stands him in good stead. He cannot be commonplace, he 
cannot be nonsensical, he cannot be affected, he cannot be sentimental. Our 
young people will get good from reading such poems as Dis Aliter I'isum, 
because Browning does not believe that true love is an unreasoning impulse, 
but rather regards it as subject to judgment and conscience. 

Passion is not its own justification ; the sympathies are under law to rea 
son ; feeling should have a basis in fact, — these are truths which greatly need 
to be taught to our easy-going, pleasure-loving time, and no one has taught 
them so well as Browning. Out of his books there blows a healthy breeze, 
as from the woods and the hills, to brace up and reinvigorate a literature 
that was fast becoming finical and dilettante. And I think I am not mistaken 
in saying that much of the modern progress toward direct and sensible 
speech, both in the pulpit and in the press ; much of the new simplicity and 
vigor which differences our talk from the bookish conversations of Walter 
Scott's novels ; aye, much of the condensation and energy of recent English 
poetry, as compared with the long-winded wearisomeness of Wordsworth, 
is to be attributed to the healthful influence of Robert Browning. 

Browning is greatest as a creative genius ; less great as an idealizer ; least 
great as a literary artist. We have said that poetry is an imaginative repro- 
duction of the universe in its ideal relations and an expression of these 
relations in rhythmical literary form. It is this standard of artistic form 
by which we have still to try our poet. Artistic form is of two sorts, or 
rather, involves two elements : first, an element of construction ; and 
secondly, an element of rhythmical and musical expression. In considering 
the constructive element, we must remember that true poetry, like true 
science, puts before us, not merely facts, but facts in their relations. In a 
great poem we want, not the materials of poetry, but an organic structure ; 
not bricks, but a house. It is a serious question whether that can be a great 
poem which compels the reader to do the poet's work. I do not attempt 
just here to decide the question ; I only suggest it, with the view of adducing 
an argument or two upon each, and then leaving the reader to judge 
for himself. For all ordinary purposes, and in all ordinary kinds of writing, 
the world has come to accept Herbert Spencer's principle of style — a 
contribution to human knowledge, by the way, of more value and longer 
to be remembered than all the rest of his philosophy — I mean the principle 
of "economy of the reader's or hearer's attention." Given in the auditor, 
for example, a certain amount of intellectual and emotional energy, then 
the less of this energy expended in grappling with the mere form of an 
address, the more there will be left to seize upon the substance. Hence the 
wisdom of making the drapery as thin as possible, that the real form may 
be the better seen. Avoid all involution and remote allusion that will 
hinder the hearer from getting at the sense. Let the phrase of your essay 



538 POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

be so simple that he who runs may read. So order your material that it 
unfolds most easily and naturally, each new sentence adding some point of 
interest, and all tending to a climax of thought and of expression. This 
is the art of putting things. The French excel In it. Every great teacher 
is in this respect a literary artist. He knows how to organize his matter so 
as to produce the most rapid, comprehensive, and powerful impression. 
And this is the first thing pointed out in Milton's description of true poetry: 
"Simple, sensuous, passionate." 

Now it is agreed by all that Browning is often obscure, and that this 
obscurity resides, not alone in the single phrase or verse, but also in the 
whole arrangement of his material. The reader often begins, as I myself 
began, with unprepossessed and even favorable mind, only to find that 
unexplained allusions throng upon him; clews are presented which, being 
tracked out, seem to lead nowhither ; in fact, a labyrinth seems to be the 
only comparison that fits the poem. Sage doubts suggest themselves either 
of the poet's sanity or of our own. Or, is he trifling with us? The average 
reader concludes at any rate that what is not worth Mr. Browning's while 
to make intelligible, it is not worth his own while to read. The very multi- 
plicity of questions that suggest themselves at every turu, and that makes so 
lively the meetings of the Browning clubs, are an offense to the man who 
does not love to think much, as he reads. I know of no author, ancient or 
modern, the mention of whose name just now excites more violent dispute. 
Certain it is that Browning divides the world. There are two hostile camps. 
If he is not of all poets the best loved by his friends, he is surely the best 
hated by his foes. Indeed, it is almost amusing to hear one who has been 
cheered, in beginning SordeUo, by the author's assurance: "Who will, may 
hear Sordello's story told," and then has floundered through what he cannot 
but regard as a mediaeval literary morass — I say, it is amusing to hear such 
a one describe the indignation with which, at the close of the poem, he read 
the words: "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told." 

It is only fair, however, to listen to Browning's defense. His method, he 
would say, is the true method, because it is the method of life. Suppose 
you go down the street to-morrow morning, and as you go, perceive in the 
distance a great crowd stretching from curb to curb. There are excitement, 
and hurried ejaculations, and much rushing to and fro. You draw near, 
and ask some person upon the periphery of the circle what it is all about. 
He gives you the curt and fragmentary answer, "Murder!" and then turns 
from you. You press your way inward, questioning others as you can, 
until gradually there rises in your mind the structure of a story; hints, 
which at first you could not understand, begin to be interpreted ; you 
modify first impressions by subsequent information ; by the time you have 
reached the centre of the crowd a whole tragedy of love, and jealousy, and 
crime, and death, has been enacted in your brain. Compare this way of 
getting at the story with the other way of reading about it all, in the evening 
paper of that same day. Which of these ways most rouses your thinking 
powers, most excites your interest and sympathy? Can any one doubt 
that it is the former? Now this is Browning's method, — he thrusts us into 
the turmoil of life, and compels us to construct the story for ourselves. He 
gives us facts, but only in a fragmentary way. What is said becomes fully 



POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 539 

Intelligible only in the light of further knowledge. What is the result? 
Why this : You become a judicial personage, and weigh evidence as the case 
unfolds before you. You become yourself a poet, a creator; and, when you 
have done, you feel that the poem is a thing of life, that you have your own 
hard-earned conception of it, that it is your poem as well as Mr. Browning's. 

All this is best illustrated in the case of The Ring and the Bonk. As those 
twenty-two thousand lines pass before your eyes, your first impulse is to give 
up the investigation, — the ease is too complicated, and life is short. But 
keep on, and the story gets a hold upon you; the characters become instinct 
with life; each new aspect of the case is like a new revelation; the whole 
poem becomes a mighty living structure, wheel within wheel — the fit type 
and representative of the life of humanity, moved upon from above by 
angelic influences and seized from beneath by the powers of hell. When 
you have read it you can call it, "'A ring without a posy, and that, mine." 
In this very sense of possession, which Browning's poems awaken, I see 
the secret of the intense interest he excites in those who have the patience 
and the grace to read him. If we have to eat our bread in the sweat of our 
brow, Browning would say that this is precisely what he has been aiming 
at, — without exercise we should have no appetite, no enjoyment of our food, 
no profit from the eating of it. 

I confess that this view of the case has much to say for itself. Certainly 
the best poetry is not that which yields its full meaning at the first cursory 
reading. If absolute intelligibility to a half-roused mind be the test of 
poetry, much of what we call the best is no ' poetry at all. No ; a man 
cannot understand the best poetry without being something of a poet ; even 
as he cannot appreciate Mount Blanc without looking at it from some 
neighboring height. The best poetry of Shakespeare, or even of Tennyson, 
is not mastered except by repeated readings ; it takes years, and maturity 
indeed, before the full glory of some great passages dawns upon us. 
Browning compels us to work for our intellectual living, more perhaps 
than any other modern poet ; but there is always the comfort of knowing 
that there is a real bag of gold at the end of this rainbow, and that there 
is a definite place where the rainbow ends. I do not think that Browning 
is obscure for the mere sake of obscurity ; what obscurity there is, is a part 
of his art, whether the principle upon which it rests is ill-judged or not. 
And, with practice, the obscure becomes plain. In fact, I find that the 
objection upon the score of obscurity is urged less and less as the reader 
becomes more and more familiar with Browning's method. He expects 
it, he sees the object of it, he is stimulated by it, he ends by becoming a 
qualified admirer of it, just as he admires the twilight and the growing 
splendor of the stars. 

Thus I have presented with all fairness the considerations pro and con, 
so far as respects the constructive element in Browning's poetry. I wish I 
could sum up and give the verdict squarely upon the side of the poet. This 
I fear I cannot do. I could do so, if I did not recognize certain "unex- 
plored remainders" in his writings, the meaning of which I have some 
doubt whether even Browning himself ever knew. In Ferishtah's Fancies 
there are certain lines printed in the original Hebrew; this looks to me 
mischievous, if not malicious. A noted Greek professor said that he could 
understand Browning's translation of Agamemnon if he were only per- 



540 POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

mittea to use the original as a "pony." I have always thought it doubtful 
whether the Romans understood their own great poets at first reading. I 
have some sympathy with the man who declared that if the Latins had had 
to learn their own language, they would have had no time to conquer the 
world. But there is seldom what you may call willful and needless obscurity 
in the classic poets. Their condensed and nervous speech was meant to 
pack things in for preservation; and it is no wonder that the original 
package sometimes takes time to untie. So Browning moans to pack his 
thought. Mrs. Orr tells us that it was a reproachful note of Miss Caroline 
Fox, that determined him nevermore to use an unnecessary word. Would 
that he had added the determination perfectly to organize his material 
before he began to write! While I see in Browning an untold wealth of 
resource, a mind most eager for expression, a power to recognize truth in 
its secret hiding-places, I see also an occasional lack of judgment as to what 
Is valuable and what is merely curious, and a lack of constructive power 
to make the most of the matter that is chosen. He seems at times content 
with first drafts ; willing to put down out of a teeming mind what first 
comes to hand ; and ready to say, upon objection made, that, if the reader 
cannot understand it, so much the worse for the reader. Here he is some- 
thing less than a great literary artist; for true art is intelligible, and no 
unintelligible poem can ever become immortal. 

I cannot leave this part of my subject without putting something of the 
poet's least intelligible verse side by side with something of his s im ples t 
and best. I know few passages more difficult as to form, yet more noble for 
depth and insight, than this one from The King and the Book: (1 : 223 sq. ) 

" God breathes, not speaks, his verdicts, felt not heard — ■ 
Passed on successively to each court, I call 
Man's conscience, custom, manners, all that make 
More and more effort to promulgate, mark 
God's verdict in determinable words, 
Till last come human jurists — solidify 
Fluid result, — what 's fixable lies forged, 
Statute, — the residue escapes in fume, 
Yet hangs aloft a cloud, as palpable 
To the finer sense as word the legist welds. 
Justinian's Pandects only make precise 
What simply sparkled in men's eyes before, 
Twitched in their brow or quivered on their lip, 
Waited the speech they called but would not come." 

Yet this passage is obscure to many, merely because the thought is profound. 
To such let us commend The Martyr's Epitaph, in which Browning shows 
himself capable of a simplicity and grandeur unsurpassed in English poetry: 
" Sickly I was, and poor, and mean — 

A slave ; no misery could screen 

The holders of the pearl of price 

From Caesar's envy ; therefore twice 

I fought with beasts, and thrice I saw 

My children suffer by his law. 

At length my own release I earned ; 

I was some time in being burned. 

But at the last a hand came through 

The flame above my head and drew 

My soul to Christ, whom now I see. 

Sergius, a brother, wrote for me 

This testimony on the wall : 

For me — I have forgot it all." 



POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. Ml 

The truest artistic form requires something more than the constructive 
element ; it implies also the element of rhythmical and musical expression. 
The good and true must be married to the beautiful. This marriage cer- 
tainly seems made in heaven, for nothing more surprises the poet than the 
leaping, from his brain, of thought and word together — wedded from their 
birth. In this matter of melodious expression, the poets differ more than 
in almost anything else. We modern and English-speaking people owe, in 
this respect, a great debt to Shelley. I find in him a "linked sweetness 
long drawn out," that Milton himself was never master of, and that Swin- 
burne has sought, but with weaker intellectual powers, to copy. It is a 
wonder that, with Browning's passionate admiration of Shelley, he has in 
his own writing so little of Shelley's distinguishing excellence. In this 
mastery of melodious expression, Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is greatly 
the superior of her husband. Compare Lady Geraldine's Courtship with 
The Flight of the Duchess; compare My Kate with The Lady of Tripoli; 
and you cannot help seeing that the wife puts into her verse a delicate 
sweetness and a tremulous emotion which the husband can never equal. 

Indeed, for a reason already suggested when I spoke of defects of con- 
struction, Robert Browning aims not to be an emotional poet. And here 
let us do him justice, as we can only do by looking at the matter from his 
peculiar point of view. Browning found the literary world well-nigh 
enslaved to a poetry in which sense was sacrificed to sound, in which melody 
of phrase took the place of thought, in which mere sweetness covered a 
multitude of sins of vagueness and rhapsody and inanity. You could read 
such poetry when half asleep, and you were quite asleep when you were 
done. Browning thought such writing beneath the dignity of the poet. 
No "Airy, fairy Lilians" would he write. His poetry should carry no one 
to heaven on flowery beds of ease. Men's minds should be alert, if they 
read him at all. Hence his brusque air, his harsh turns, his scorn for the 
merely sensuous and quieting, his startling us from dreams into sense. A 
little poem of his illustrates this: 

" Verse-making was least of my virtues : I viewed with despair 

Wealth that never yet was, but might be, — all that verse-making were, 
If the life would but lengthen to wish, let the mind be laid bare. 
So I said ' To do little is bad, to do nothing is worse ' — 
And made verse. 

Love-making — how simple a matter! No depths to explore, 
No heights in a life to ascend ! No disheartening Before, 
No affrighting Hereafter, — love now will be love evermore. 
So I felt, ' To keep silence were folly — all language above,' 
I made love." 

It reminds me of an out-of-door play of my early days which bore the 
name of "Snap the Whip." A long line was formed of boys taking hold 
of hands, the biggest and strongest boy at one end of the line, the smallest 
and most unsuspecting at the other, many fine gradations between. The 
game was to swing the line around, with the big boy for the centre, and to 
swing it around with such momentum that the little boy at the small end 
should be thrown off like a comet from the solar system. It was fine fun 
for the big boy ; for the little one it meant the general demoralization of 



542 POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

his attire and the breaking of bis head against tbe fence. Many a time, as 
I have read Robert Browning and have been burled off into vacancy by one 
of bis sudden turns, I have ft-lt like tbe little boy in "'Snap tbe Wbip." It 
is all very well for Mr. Browning, but bow about the unsophisticated reader? 
Is it possible for bira to escape a certain sense of injury? 

Emotion, music, grace — these are not so native to Robert Browning as 
thought. The philosopher often overtops the poet. His harshness is not 
all to be pardoned upon tbe plea that it is a higher kind of art. Much of 
it Is to be accounted for only upon the ground that 'it is his nature to." 
Verse is not quite spontaneous with him. John Stuart Mill's conception of 
God is somewhat similar. The imperfections of the universe, he thinks, 
argue either lack of love or lack of power in the supreme Intelligence ; he 
prefers to doubt the power, rather than to doubt the love ; God does the best 
be can, but he has to work with very intractable material. And so Mill 
speaks of God as if he were some weak old man trudging up-hill with a 
mighty burden which he cannot easily manage, which, in fact, he is just aide 
to carry — a shocking representation of Him whom we know to be infinite 
in power as well as infinite in love. I have sometimes thought that the 
representation was an excellent one of merely earthly creators, and of none 
more so than of Mr. Browning. His material at times seems too much fur 
him. The metal is not hot enough to run freely into poetic moulds ; the 
metal is of the best, but the power to shape it into perfect forms — tbe 
highest measure of this is lacking. 

In Italy they have a peculiar way of cooking and serving that pretty little 
bird, the ortolan. It is transfixed with a skewer, but upon the skewer are 
also put a piece of brown toast upon tbe one side, a sage-leaf upon tbe 
other. So come, in thick succession, sage-leaf, ortolan, toast, sage-leaf, 
ortolan, toast, repeated as many times as need be. Browning likens bis 
writing, very justly, to the combination of these three. The ortolan repre- 
sents the poetry; the sage-leaf furnishes piquancy; the brown toast is 
nothing but sound sense. I admire bis candor, — few poets are so frank. 
My only fear is that at times when ortolans were scarce and thin, Mr. 
Browning may have made up for their lack by putting two sage-leaves in 
place of one, and by indefinitely increasing the size and thickness of the 
brown toast. I would not indulge myself, however, nor would I advise my 
younger readers to indulge, in the calm superciliousness with which many 
intelligent people still treat Robert Browning. It is not wise to assume 
that so steadily growing a fame and so marked an influence upon current 
literature are without any just foundation. It is best to take account of the 
forces of our time; we cannot afford to be ignorant of them. The youth 
who postponed his crossing of the stream until the water should flow by 
had to wait for a long time. So. it seems to me, the man who regards what 
he calls the •'Browning-cult" as a mere temporary craze, " exspectat, dam 
defluit anuvis." Those who know most of Browning are rather inclined 
to say of him as Isocrates said of Heracleitus: "What I know of him is so 
excellent that I can draw conclusions from it concerning what I cannot 
understand." 

And one can say all this without for a moment surrendering bis powers of 
nritica] judgment. He only insists that wisdom does not exclude wonder. 



POETRY AND ROBERT BROWNING. 543 

and that we live, as intellectual and spiritual beings, only by ''admiration, 
hope, and love." The nil admirari spirit is the spirit of decrepitude and 
death, and faith in great men is next to faith in God. I would not have 
Robert Browning's defects of artistic form blind any of my readers to the 
broad humanity of the poet and his ideal pictures of the deep thoughts of 
man's heart. No poet of this century is so widely learned, no poet has so 
pondered the great problems of existence, no poet has uttered so much of 
important truth. There is, of course, a higher poetry than his, a poetry of 
wider range, of sweeter sound, of deeper spiritual significance. As civili- 
zation goes on, imagination will not fall into disuse, but will reach a higher 
development. To believe otherwise is to fancy that an inalienable preroga- 
tive of the human soul can be sloughed off as a mere excrescence, or cau 
dwindle till it ceases to be. No, imagination belongs to man; and, as with 
advancing ages man's range of vision widens, imagination will only be 
furnished with larger and nobler materials; will only have deeper insight 
into the ideal relations of the universe ; will only grow in power to express 
the truth. With larger truth will come deeper emotions, and with deeper 
emotions will come greater perfection of artistic form. If there were only 
as much of us at all times as there is at some times, and if power of expres- 
sion only answered always to the heart's desire, living would be a delight 
and earth would be heaven. I take the very sense of imperfection in all 
poetry of the past as an incentive to look forward. I not only anticipate 
no decline of poetry, but I confidently predict a day when, under the 
influence of a diviner spirit than any earthly muse, poetry shall be the chief 
handmaid of religion, the incarnate God shall be its chief subject, and the 
poet shall undertake "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." I look 
for a grander poetry on earth, — but I am not content with this. I want all 
God's sons and daughters to prophesy; I trust we shall all be poets in the 
New Jerusalem ; I long for the great future, when the soul can fully express 
herself, when form shall answer to spirit, when language shall be the perfect 
vehicle of thought, and when all speech shall be song. 



L. 
ADDRESSES TO SUCCESSIVE GRADUATING CLASSES 

OF THE ROCHESTER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 



1873: 
'THE THREE ONLIES." 



Dear Brethren : — It is my pleasant duty to declare your preliminary 
work in the Rochester Theological Seminary as at length completed, to 
congratulate you upon the good measure of success with which that work 
has been performed, and to commend you to the guidance and blessing of 
the great Head of the Church in that larger work to which you go and which 
I trust he has called you to do. 

There is an element of sadness in this occasion. We shall see your faces, 
and you will see each other's faces, no more for many a year — perhaps never 
again until we all come to lay the fruits of our labors at the Master's feet. 
Yet the dominant feeling in your hearts as well as in ours to-night is one of 
rejoicing, — in yours, because you break through the last obstacle that holds 
you back from the wider life and broader influence to which you have been 
so long aspiring, — in ours, because your going out from us gives us new 
faith that Christ is making the Institution from which you graduate a power 
for the building up of his kingdom in the world. 

Not because you are so many or because you add so greatly to the number 
of his ministers do we rejoice, but rather because we trust that under God 
you will improve the quality of ministerial work in the land and the world. 
In one sense there are ministers enough, — but of men thoroughly furnished, 
men who know the times, men who know the truth of God as the only and all- 
sufficient remedy for the evils of these times and of all times, men who have 
learned from God the secret of divine wisdom and power in bringing this truth 
to bear upon the living hearts of men, men who believe in a personal God, a 
present Savior, an old but everlasting gospel, and who are willing to give 
themselves body and soul for life and death to the preaching of it — of these, 
though thank God we have many, we have not enough. If you be such men, 
my brethren, the world is waiting and longing for your coming; God calls 
you forward to your work, assuring your success and your reward ; and all 
the churches of our Lord cry: "How beautiful upon the mountains are the 
feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth 
good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation, that saith unto Zion, Thy 
God reigneth." 

The German poet said: "Respect the dreams of thy youth!" There is 
544 



1873: 'THE THREE 0NL1ES." 545 

a loftiness of aspiration and an enthusiasm of self-sacrifice which belongs to 
the youth of Christ's servants. Now, if ever in life, noble voices speak with- 
in you, urging you to the highest consecration, and the most absolute and 
faithful following of the path marked out by God. I would be the mouth- 
piece of the Spirit to-night. 1 would stir up those familiar but central 
thoughts which are the inspiration and power of every successful ministry. 
I would commend to you anew those old and tried ideas and powers, which 
have proved their strength by leading the march of the kingdom until now. 

There are three of them, — and the first of them is the word of God. In 
the personality of that word, as I may term it, speaking as with living voice 
to him who reads it or hears it preached, discerning as it does the thoughts 
and intents of the heart, bringing the soul into contact with the living God, 
we have the sufficient proof of its divinity and inspiration. This Institution 
has sought to ground you in that word, as the norm of faith, the source of 
comfort, the guide of life. Preach that word, my brethren, in its due pro- 
portion, in its relations to the times, in its sole and supreme authority. 
Remember that, if human opinion speak not according to that word, it is 
because there is no light in it. Remember that by that word we must be 
approved or condemned at the last day. Not novelties, not paradoxes, not 
sensations, not tricks of eloquence, not progressive views, but the old word 
of God that is arle to make us wise unto salvation — let this be the weapon, 
and the only weapon, of your ministry. As you shall bring this word of God, 
this sword of the Spirit, to bear upon the conscience and the heart, with all 
its penetrating and clearing power, shall your work be judged a success or 
a failure. 

But by this word you are to lead men to something beyond the word — to 
Him who speaks through the word, I mean to the living Christ. Not imper- 
sonal truth, viewless and impalpable, a breath that enters the ear and leaves 
it as soon, but a living personal Redeemer, who makes God known and 
brings the soul into relations of amity and communion with him — this is the 
unspeakable gift of God — this is the hope of the ministry. Not faith in an 
abstract God, but in a living, present Savior — one whose work outside of 
us has reconciled God to us, one whose work within us has reconciled us to 
"iud — this is the faith of the gospel. The hope of the Church and the world 
is a living Christ — not a Christ stretched upon the crucifix, not a dead 
Christ entombed and buried, but a risen and glorified Savior, exalted to give 
repentance and remission of sins. — No success, till you bring men to this 
faith in a living Jesus and to personal dealings of Jesus with their souls, — 
actual communication of life to life — heart beating against heart, — inter- 
course and communion with One whose presence and being are more real to 
us than the existence of the world around us. The personal knowledge of 
this Christ — introduction to him. life in him — this is the end and aim of the 
Christian ministry. 

How can this be realized? Partly by the spirit of our own lives. Do you 
not remember how some unlettered man has thrilled you, and drawn you to 
Christ, by his simple words of love to Jesus? Do you not know how a true 
Christian man makes all men who meet him feel the indefinable attraction 
of his goodness and self-sacrifice? Believe that the presence of Christ in 
you will give you, even though your natural powers may not be the greatest, 
35 



546 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

an attraction to all believers, and an influence to draw all men to God. The 
power of a life lived by faith in the Son of God — why, it is Irresistible ! lie 
must succeed who sides with God. But not simply because his own spirit 
is a power. No! there is a divine Spirit that makes man's weakness strength, 
that teaches man to labor and to pray, and that supplements his efforts with 
divine efficiency. 

They are Luther's ''three onlies" — these powers of the Christian ministry 
— the word of God only, faith in Christ only, the power of the Spirit only. 
Trust these, my brethren. In the strength of these, go forth to meet this 
living age, and the living God shall go with you. There is no work so noble 
on earth to do — none that so develops mind and heart. Whether outward 
success may be yours or not, is little matter. God will make your work the 
means of developing in you the highest manhood, and your labor shall not 
be in vain in the Lord. As you come back in future years to this scene of 
your early studies and vows, we shall greet you as soldiers who bring good 
news from the fight, — we shall send you out again, as we do now. laden with 
our prayers that God will give you a multitude of trophies in the great con- 
flict. But whether the reward shall come on earth or not, be willing all the 
same to labor, with God and the angels for your witnesses, and the Judgment 
for the teriing-day and day of triumph. But I must not detain you. The 
time of preparation is past. Your work calls you. Go forth to meet it. 
Quit you like men, and may the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the love of 
God, and the communion and participation of the Holy Ghost, be with you 
both now and evermore, Amen. 



1874: 
TRUTH AND LOVE. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class: — This hour is one of the serious 
hours of life. To you, because it marks the completion of your preparatory 
work, and the opening of the great doors that hitherto have shut you out from 
the business of life. To me serious, because it marks the close of my first 
course of instruction, the end of the first imperfect round of theological inves- 
tigation. You are my first children, and first children have a peculiar place 
in the parent's heart which none have after. I may be confidential with you 
now, and tell you how I prayed when I first half tremblingly undertook my 
work, that God would give me for my first pupils a considerate class — a 
class by whose side and upon whose level I could put myself, for honest and 
patient and earnest study of God's great system of truth. I wish to thank 
you publicly for the kindness and candor with which you have received my 
teaching. No captious or ungentle word has ever been spoken even in the 
greatest stress and fervor of our disputings together. And in all our per- 
sonal relations there has been the warmth of a Christian affection, which to 
this hour I believe has not ceased or even diminished, but has steadily 
increased even to the end. It has been my joy and crown to see that con- 
verse with the truth was stiffening the fibre and widening the reach of your 
winds, aud that with Intellectual progress then was also religious growth 



1874: TRUTH AND LOVE. 547 

But we have come to the end at last. Such as it is, and whatever it is, my 
mark upon you has been made. You go out to be the first representatives 
of my training and influence. Do you wonder that I hestitate to say the 
word that parts us, — that I would fain hold you still, to better my work, — 
that it is with great sadness, even with my great hopes for your future, that 
I hasten on to the blessing and the farewell? 

This occasion will never come again, and none resembling it. There is 
more of personality in it, than ever can be again. And though this address 
is, in its original design, an expression of others' good wishes than my own, 
you will allowe me to make it to-night the vehicle of my own thought with 
regard to you, and so a summing up of what I have desired the general 
influence of Seminary instruction to be. I can only indicate the two main 
features of it. First, to form the fixed habit of earnest pondering and inde- 
pendent judgment with regard to the truth, as to doctrine and duty. That 
implies a fundamental conviction that there is such a thing as truth in 
spiritual things, reality corresponding to normally conducted thinking. It 
implies a burning desire, an unalterable determination, to know the most of 
this truth that the strength and range of our understandings will admit. It 
implies the instinct of progress — putting shame on any idolizing of past 
attainments, and making willingness to accept new light, from every quarter 
under heaven, the very watchword of all investigation. No contemptuous 
sneering at opponents, no dogmatizing as if wisdom would die with us, but 
fair-mindedness in recognizing objection and allowing it all proper weight, 
while at the same time we put it in its place of subordination, if that be its 
due. It implies holding to the truth, standing by the truth, living for the 
truth, and living out the truth when we have found it, — our progress ruled 
by the facts of revelation, marked not by disregard of them but by greater 
reverence for them, — no arbitrary and irrational progress, but a progress 
according to law — the double law of nature and of Scripture. I believe, 
my brethren, that we have together dug down to some great rocky facts of 
being, and have to some extent built alike upon these. But if you go out 
to complete your structure of Christian doctrine, brick for brick like that 
which you have seen us build, you are no true disciples of ours. Remember 
that we have taught you that the word of God is infinitely higher than all 
human teachers, — and that, if you are to be living men influencing your 
age for God, you must "prove all things — holding fast only that which is 
good." 

Secondly, we have desired that the discipline of this Seminary should form 
in you the habit of seeking the truth, holding the truth, speaking the truth, 
living the truth, in love. Our theological institutions have often been 
charged with making men critical at the expense of the emotional life ; intel- 
lectual at the expense of practical power ; learned at the expense of piety. 
I trust you have proved the contrary in your own experience. I know that 
clearer views of truth have opened new fountains of emotion within you, 
given you new weapons for practical work, drawn you into closer sympathy 
and communion with Christ. Let me remind you that the aim of all our 
instruction has been to show that truth and love are not only consistent with 
each other, but that truth without love is not truth, — that only love can find 
the truth, or utter the truth, or hold the truth, or live the truth. I repeat to 



548 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

you now, what I have said in a hundred forms before, that only as you are 
men given to Christ in a self -sacrificing love that reflects the love of Geth- 
semaue and Calvary, can you ever know the inner secrets of God's word, or 
have power to win a single soul from darkness to light. Will you ever forget 
that no true preaching and no true living for God is possible without having 
Christ himself, the living love of God within? — without knowing by personal 
and blessed experience that union with Christ which is the central fact of all 
theology and of all religion? — without being possessed by a higher, larger, 
more enduring energy than that of a weak, unstable, human will — even the 
energy of Christ's loving, indwelling Spirit? Forget all else, my brethren, 
but forget not this. By it. your life and your ministry stand or fall. You 
can do all things through Christ who strengthens you, but without him you 
can do nothing. 

I trust these two great principles of all noble living — truth-seeking and 
Christ-loving — have taken such possession of you here, that entrance upon 
more direct and active labors for men's salvation will be no shock to you, 
but only the joyful widening of your sphere. Our hearts go forward with 
you into the future before you. Your future is our future, your labors our 
labors, your trials our trials, your success our success. I cannot tell you of 
the eagerness with which we shall listen for tidings of you, nor of the joy 
with which we shall hear that you are growing in power to unfold God's 
truth, that you are learning new spiritual lessons of communion with Christ, 
that you are developing new tenderness and patience and self-sacrifice in 
your care for the flock of God, and in your toilful efforts to bring erring and 
perverted souls into the fold. Work and pray for Christ and his Church ; 
take the place he puts ycu in ; think not of reward ; lose your lives for 
God's sake; and the reward will be sure enough, and great enough. Having 
been "faithful over a few things" on earth, Christ will make you "rulers 
over many things" when he comes in the Judgment. Go, then, and God be 
with you ! Farewell. 



1S75: 
MANHOOD IN THE MINISTRY. 



Bbethhen of the Graduatixg Class : — All earthly things come to an 
end, and we have reached the end of our work together. It is not simply 
custom which bids me address to you this parting word. You have been faith- 
ful students, and we believe you to be good and true men. Three years of 
mental contact and of harmonious intercourse cannot be terminated without 
regrets, and these regrets I express not only for myself but for the whole 
faculty, including that instructor whose ill health and absence is so great a 
source of grief both to himself and to us. It is little we can now do for you. 
I trust our best lessons have been already learned too well for time's effacing 
fingers ever to blot them from your memories. Yet one word more — this 
it is — be true men in order that you may be true ministers of Christ, — 
regard the culture and maintenance of your own manhood as a prime con- 
dition of successful service. 



1875 : MANHOOD IN THE MINISTRY. 549 

There is a sense In which I would not have you follow this exhortation. 
It is possible to seek self first and Christ last — to identify Christ with true 
manhood rather than true manhood with Christ. It makes all the difference 
in the world whether we make Christ or man the centre of our system — 
whether we take the law of Scripture, or become a law to ourselves. Our 
nature is perverted ; we cannot wholly trust its impulses. Only in Christ 
do we find the true humanity — the archetype and standard and source of 
true manhood for us. It is not then a self-centered development, with the 
distant aim of honoring Christ, to which 1 exhort you. What I do urge 
upon you is a development of Christian manhood, after Christ's model and 
by the help of his Spirit, as prior both in order and importance to the mere 
official work and outward service which you have been called to do. 

True manhood in the ministry, — the very notion is a negation of several 
ignoble conceptions of ministerial life and character. You are not hired 
caterers to popular amusement, or special policemen to ferret out public or 
private delinquencies ; you are not expounders of an abstract system or creed, 
or creatures of a different mould and order from your fellows to deal out 
salvation to them by any external appliances or ordinances. You are to be 
men among men, meeting men on their own level, aiming directly at their 
understanding and sympathy, and therefore putting away as one of Satan's 
devices every peculiarity of dress or tone which savors of mere profession- 
alism and which turus men's thoughts to the minister rather than to the 
man. 

The more obvious elements of true manliness, such as moral thougbtful- 
ness, decision of character, and resolute courage, I do not need to mention 
to you. I wish to emphasize two or three of the less commonly noticed 
characteristics of true manhood, — and one is openness. Openness of mind 
and heart ; openness to receive — openness to give. It has been called a 
chief element of greatness, and if greatness is a growth, it must be so ; for, 
ouly where there is the openness of true sympathy, the entering into the 
mind and life of others, the readiness to take in good of every sort, can there 
be real growth of mind or heart. The narrow prejudice and egotism that 
shut men up in their own dignity and opinion bar out the very material of 
which greatness is made, and they equally bar out that which is greater than 
greatness, namely, this true manhood of which I speak. Openness to give 
also — the openness that gathers in all treasures of nature and art, literature 
and life, only to melt them in the fires of Christian love and send them forth 
new-stamped, with Christ's image and superscription marked upon each coin, 
so that every fact of the world becomes a witness to God and his salvation 
— this openness of receiving and giving is necessary to make us men. You 
have a mind and heart and will of your own. God has renewed these pow- 
ers of yours, and has given you experience of his grace. Now let what is in 
you come out. Away with that shamefacedness and timidity and suspicious- 
ness that are born of unbelief and vanity and supreme care for self. Cast 
yourselves upon God, and then tell out your very souls to men. You will 
not only be true men yourselves, but you will make true men of others ; for 
it Is the law of progress of God's kingdom that mind should answer to mind 
and heart to heart, and that the openness of true manhood should be self- 
eommunicpting. 



550 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

I have another element to add which is hard to name, but which seems to 
me specially important, — let me call it spontaneity of movement. I mean 
by it a self-determined activity of all the powers. That is a true notion of 
our relation to God's Spirit which holds that we are to be possessed by God 
and used by God just as really as if we were inert instruments or machines, 
but that is a very false notion of the relation which holds that therefore we 
are nothing more than inert instruments or machines. Would that we could 
utterly rid ourselves of the notion that God's working in the human soul 
makes us any the less truly men, or supersedes in any degree our own activ- 
ity. Christianity is not passivity, — it is new life and energy and will. The 
preacher who idly waits for his sermon or his audience to come to him, 
instead of working out his sermon and gathering his audience, needs to be 
taught the first principles of Christ's work. There is a sense in which a man 
is to have no will of his own, but there is also a sense in which he is to be 
all will. He is to do God's will with all the power of his own will. He Is 
to be irrepressible in his invention, his enterprise, his onset. Like water 
running down hill, if he is checked in one direction, he is to find his way 
downward in another. Men are to be reached, something is to be accom- 
plished. The preacher is to be all things to all men, if by any means he 
may save some. The strongest thing in the universe that we know anything 
about next to God, is a living human will, and it is God's purpose that this 
human will shall serve him. There are quite enough ministers who fancy 
that their whole work for God is that of suffering God's will. The great 
trouble with the ministry of our time is that there are so many in its ranks 
who have to be supported — mere hangers-on and camp-followers, instead 
of soldiers and leaders in the fight. I pray you, if no place comes to you, 
make a place for yourselves. Strike out some new path into the moral 
wastes of city or country or world. Such were all the early laborers of the 
church of Christ. Serving an apprenticeship of this sort, beginning at the 
lowest round of the ladder, proving the power of the gospel upon the least 
promising subjects and in the least promising conditions, will make men of 
you, and will give you a power and influence in the future which now you can- 
not measure. Use your wills, then ; determine upon success ; hew your way 
toward it. Be sure that Christ your Master would have you no waifs upon 
the surface of the stream, but active and original powers to turn the current 
of the world's history into the channel of his purposes. He has sent you to 
make your mark upon society and the church, and to summon up resolve 
and determination and daring to fullfil this calling is not pride or arrogance 
or overweening ambition, but is that very working out of your own salva- 
tion which proves that God is working in you to will and to do. 

Openness — spontaneity — these are two. But there is one more — I mean 
concentration. This is an age of division of labor. Specialties in study and 
work rule the day. No man can now be, like Michael Angelo, painter, 
sculptor, architect, poet, man of society, all in one. No man can make nim- 
self a lawyer without devoting himself to law — and to some department of 
the law. So with medicine — so with trade. And yet many a minister of 
Christ fancies that he can be an investigator in science, and a writer for 
reviews, and an amateur in art, and a popular lecturer, and still do justice 
to the pulpit. Dr. Chalmers thought so in his youth. It was only when 



1873: MANHOOD IN THE MINISTRY. 551 

Dr. Chalmers changed his mind and gave himself body and soul to preach 
lug, that he began to stir Scotland. Of all things essential to true manhood 
this is behind none, namely, unity of purpose ; and of all pitiable spectacles 
this is one of the most pitiable — a universal dilettante in the ministry. To 
move men in masses by the power of Christ's gospel — is not this enough to 
stir one man's pulses with enthusiasm? The cry about decline of the pulpit 
means simply this, that preachers have sometimes been ashamed of their 
work, and have ceased to make full proof of their ministry. Preaching has 
not lost its power, where men put all their power into preaching. The pul- 
pit is a very throne for the man who will spend himself in it. I do not 
disparage broad studies. I say the preacher must be open to every whisper 
of the world, but I do say that the pulpit must be the focus of the whisper- 
ing gallery where all sounds converge. The horniletical habit must be the 
dominant habit of the preacher's soul. In that pleading with men on behalf 
of the living God, all endowments and all culture may have part, and all 
themes in heaven and earth may be laid under tribute for argument or cor- 
roboration ; but none of these endowments and none of this learning will be 
worth a straw to one of you, if they be not made wholly subservient to the 
one purpose of making you able ministers of the New Testament and good 
stewards of the manifold grace of God. 

Be true men, then, in order that you may be true ministers, — men of open 
mind and heart, men of will and spontaneous energy, men devoted to a 
single aim. But every review of this sort inevitably leads us back to the 
point from which we started. You cannot be true men — men of the stamp I 
have indicated — without being true ministers. The man makes the minister, 
but the minister also makes the man. Only as you know Christ and love 
Christ and obey Christ, only as you live in him and are ruled by him, can 
you really be any of these things. But you know all this. This has been 
the staple of our teaching and talk and prayer for three years past. Only 
in Him who is the perfect flower and embodiment of true humanity — the 
head and source of a new human nature answering to the divine idea — can 
we find agaiu the true manhood which was lost in the fall. But there, in 
the risen and glorified Jesus, it is, for us and for all. 

You go forth on different errands, some to teach, some to preach, — some 
to carry the torch of salvation out into the heathen darkness, some to keep 
the lights burning at home. But your work is one, and your Lord is one. 
Alike you aim to bring men to the comprehension and attainment of Chris- 
tian manhood. You can do this, only as you yourselves grow up into the 
stature of perfect men in Christ Jesus, only as the minister becomes in the 
highest sense the man. I commend you to that perfect man who is God 
also, and who is able to make you like himself. I bid you depend wholly 
upon him. But, as my last word to you, I urge you not to satisfy yourselves 
with passive trust and waiting, but with open soul and vigorous resolve and 
unity of purpose, to ''quit you like men" in this one and only life that is 
given you to live, and which from this moment opens before you. 



552 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

187G: 
WORK AND POWER. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class : — With much struggle you have 
by God's favor pushed your way to your present stage of preparation for 
the gospel ministry. You have all of you in various ways commended your 
selves to your instructors in this Institution, and we send you forth with thp 
confidence that your training here will prove not to have been in vain. It 
tempers the sadness of our parting with you to think that you constitute 
our annual quota of reinforcement to the leaders of Christ's militant church. 

You can well understand how hope for your future should mingle with 
anxiety. Life is so short, eternity is so long, that which is now has in It so 
much of that which is to come, that I cannot let you go without reminding 
you again, and with the solemnity of a last appeal, of a relation most needful 
to be considered in these our times, — I mean the relation between work and 
power. You have sharpened your tools ; your work is before you ; have 
you the power that will enable you to do it for God? 

Of the two, power is the primary and more important. In a great machine- 
shop a hundred men may stand at their lathes, ready with their tools for work, 
but a slight neglect or mistake in the engine-room may cut off the steam and 
render their skill of no avail. He would be a sorry miller who should devote 
his whole attention to setting the burr-stones and buying the wheat, while he 
gave no care to provide a water-supply to run his wheel. The wise manu- 
facturer will have his reserves of power for exigencies, and will make sure 
of the connections between that power and the looms it is to move. Nature 
makes no mistakes here. She stores up nervous force in the brain like 
electricity in a Leyden jar, — when the critical moment comes, there is hard- 
ness to the muscle and strength to the blow. The power that moves our 
modern world, so far as its material progress is concerned, is derived from 
the coal-measures which nature made ready ages ago. And now if God and 
man make so much of power, shall the Christian minister forget it, when he 
has a work to do compared with which the mighty achievements of secular 
industry and the greatest movements of the natural world are but child's 
play? 

For all power we are dependent. We are not self-moving machines. The 
body must be fed, — the mind must be disciplined and furnished. No man 
is self-made, — no man is self -sustained. Whatever of power he uses or has, 
he gets from outside himself. He draws upon and employs God's power. 
Dependence is the condition of finite being. But what is true even in the 
natural realm is far more profoundly, intensely true In the realm of spirit. 
For all spiritual life and energy we are absolutely dependent upon God. No 
spiritual work done without him can prosper ; but that is not the whole of 
it — severed from Him we can accomplish nothing. Shut the sluice-gate 
through which God's power flows into you, — the mill-race runs dry, the 
sound of the grinding is low, soon it ceases altogether. Cut off your base of 
supplies in God and the provision of his Spirit, — you are in the enemy's 
hands ; you are captured or you starve. To learn this lesson that we have 
no strength of ourselves — this is the end of precept and warning, of chastise- 



1876: WORK AND POWER. 553 

ment and humiliation. We cannot keep our own souls alive, — much less can 
we bring out from their graves the spiritually dead. But all is changed 
when God's power is given to us. Then wonders are wrought in the renew- 
ing of human hearts, fit to be compared with that marvel of the ages when 
the soul of God was put into the body of the dead Christ and he was raised 
from the tomb in life and glory. 

The power exists — as real, as mighty, as accessible as the forces of nature 
which man bends to his purposes of art and industry. How are we to obtain 
and use it? Just as we obtain and use any other power — by acting according 
to its laws. No man really compels nature to serve him, except by obeying 
her. We discover her methods and apply them, and then we say that we 
control her. So this Niagara-power of spiritual influence in God we bind 
to our work, only as we discover its laws and submit ourselves to them. For 
here is more than nature — more than blind force, such as men conceive to 
move the spheres. Here is a living will, a personal and present God. We 
use his power only as we are used by Him. We secure his help and inspi- 
ration only as we recognize him as Supreme and Sovereign, blowing where 
he listeth, dividing to every man severally as he will, and in that conviction 
turn ourselves from agents into instruments, and deem it our highest honor 
to be arrows in the hand of the Almighty. 

That was excellent theological instruction that Christ gave for three years 
to his apostles, but he did not deem them fitted for their work till they had 
received another and a higher gift — the gift of the Spirit. They had done 
work for him before, but it was like work done on a hand machine, where 
the energy was mostly spent in turning the crank. After Pentecost, they 
were power-machines, — no effort now — they could not but speak the things 
they had seen and heard. Enthusiasm — ev &e<Z — they had this, now that 
they were possessed by the Spirit of God. Their faces had a strange light, 
their voices a strange tenderness, their very gestures a strange power, to 
impress and move and win men to the service of their Lord. Their faith be- 
came contagious. Doubt vanished, as it heard the story of Christ. Through 
the work of the Spirit, the cross of shame became the power of God. 

We have no right idea of the Christian ministry, unless we conceive of it 
as a prophetic office. No miracle-working, no revelation of new truth, but 
special direction and power of the Holy Spirit in the unfolding and appli- 
cation of the old truth of the Bible to men's present circumstances and needs 
— this is the New Testament prophesying to which you are called. And 
what shall a prophet be without the Spirit? And how shall the Spirit be 
obtained or retained without prayer? The apostles "gave themselves to 
prayer, and to the ministry of the word." Let the ministry of to-day in like 
manner make prayer and preaching coordinate in rank and importance; let 
them give to supplication for the gifts of the Spirit the first place and the 
best place in their time and regard, — instead of making a be-all and end-all 
of direct efforts to impress strong hearts with truth which the preacher can- 
not feel himself ; in short, let the work of the ministry be only a supplement 
to the continuous seeking of power from on high ; and Pentecost will come 
again, never more to cease from the earth, until every heart of man has felt 
Christ's power to save. 

May God put it into your hearts, my brethren, to be examples of a new 



554 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

ministry of the Spirit to the century of history upon which the land is just 
about to enter. If the close of the two decades and a half in the life of this 
Seminary which is marked by this Anniversary could be signalized by the 
sending forth of thirteen men who believed in "the power of the Spirit 
only" as the means by which Christ's truth is to triumph — believed it so 
that they gave their lives to the practical proving and illustrating of it, — it 
would be worthy fruit of all this quarter-century of theological education. 
Not less of knowledge or training or labor — but more of the Spirit of God 
to interfuse this knowledge and training and labor with an energy foreign 
to mere human nature — springing from the boundless depths of the divine 
heart and manifesting the resistless movement of the divine will ! If he who 
was with us when the year began — your teacher in the word of God which 
he so humbly and implicitly believed and which he so vividly and thoroughly 
expounded — but who to-night in a nobler assembly celebrates a nobler fes- 
tival than ours, — if he could speak to you from the midst of that uncreated 
light where there is no seeming, but only endless and perfect vision of the 
truth, would it not be to say some words like these: ''Be first true men of 
God, possessed by God, subject to God. Seek first God's power, through 
prayer and obedience. Receive, through faith, the Holy Ghost, the promise 
of the Father. Then ponder and preach his truth, with the Spirit sent down 
from heaven, so that your faith and the faith of men may stand, not in the 
wisdom of men, but in the power of God." 

My brethren, there is a voice that speaks to you, — but it is a better voice 
than that of any sainted one. It is the voice of him whom Dr. Hackett 
served on earth, and whom he serves in heaven. The words come echoing 
down to us from the time when they were first spoken in the upper chamber 
from which the twelve apostles were to go forth to preach the gospel of the 
kingdom. They are Christ's words to you also, as you go out to do his work 
in the world. Listen and you shall hear him saying: — "Peace be unto you! 
As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. Receive ye the Holy 
Ghost" 



1S77: 
COURAGE, PASSIVE AND ACTIVE. 



Brethren ov the Graduating Class : — You have fulfilled your course 
of preliminary study for the ministry. Your class is the largest ever gradu- 
ated from the Seminary, yet death has not once invaded your ranks. The 
last labors of Hackett and Buckland have been spent upon you, and you 
have joined in our sorrow over their loss. Common chastisements and warn- 
ings have drawn us nearer to each other, and to Christ. We will iuterpret 
your feelings to-night by our own. Your instructors cannot see this peculiar 
intimacy of association come to a close without poignant regret. We sorrow 
that we shall see your faces no more. We have no fears for you. The place 
you have taken and the work you have done are guarantees under God for 
your future. That future will hardly be changed by anything I shall say 
to-night. But knowing how your work looms up before you, and how an 



1S77 : COURAGE, PASSIVE AND ACTIVE. 5oo 

ingenuous mind shrinks from its untried responsibilities, I would fain speak 
one word iu such a tone that it may echo and re-echo down the long reaches 
of your public career, and, whenever memory repeats it from her walls, may 
give you new hope and inspiration. 

That one word is — Courage. It is a large word. There is a passive cour- 
age. It is the Scripture vnofj.ov^ — patience, fortitude, endurance. Nothing 
more needed, when we have to suffer, or to stand and wait. It is the martyr- 
spirit. It lives in you, it lives in myriads of believing hearts, though, like 
smouldering embers, it takes the wild wind of adversity or of persecution to 
strip it of its ashy crust, and reveal its steady glow. But the martyr is not 
only a sufferer, — he is a witness. There is something positive and aggres- 
sive about him. He gives testimony. And to give testimony requires courage 
of another sort — active courage — that independent, whole-hearted, out- 
spoken courage which the New Testament calls nappiqa-ia or boldness. It is 
this active courage that I would commend to you. I know that if you have 
this, you will have the other. If the fire is only kept up, there will be coals 
enough for the time of need. 

And now let me mention three things in which this courage will inevitably 
manifest itself. The first is, intelligent independence, — I exhort you to this. 
Not the audacity of questioning or superseding revelation ; not the folly and 
self-sufficiency of ignoring past interpretations of revelation ; but the duty 
of going directly to the sacred oracle to hear what God the Lord will speak. 
I bid you believe and preach what you find in God's word, though all the 
theologies of all the world are against you. Value your own opinions formed 
by humble and prayerful study of the Scriptures. They are as good as any 
other man's opinions, — at any rate, they are the only opinions of decisive 
value to you. When you have found the truth, be free to express the truth. 
Speak it out while you feel it, and as you feel it, without too great particu- 
larity of phrase. Show your mind and your heart to men. Be so sincere 
and transparent and demonstrative that you are willing to blunder. Let no 
overbearing man, let the terror of no audience, face you down. Have a 
proper self-confidence. Magnify your office. Make no apologies. Let no man 
despise your youth. There are a great plenty of men who are run in one 
mould. In your first creation and in your new creation, God gave you 
peculiarities of mind and heart and will. He would have you lead a life, 
and exert an influence for him, in some respects different from that of any 
other servant of his that ever breathed upon this planet. Have courage 
then to be yourselves. 

Intellectual independence — that is the first manifestation of active cour- 
age. The second is, practical force. You may be different from every other 
human being, yet make no mark to indicate it. Let us be thankful that our 
national spirit demands of every man positive achievement. Better not live 
at all, than to do nothing in the world. To be a mere recipient, to spend 
one's days in self -culture, to float through life artistically reclining upon the 
cushions of a gondola — this can be tolerated in the old world, but not in the 
new. It belongs to classic, not to Christian times. "What wilt thou have 
me to do?" — that is the keynote of the new dispensation. My brethren, 
God sends you out to accomplish something. You are to make yourselves 
felt. You are to turn the world upside down. When you take the bow, you 



556 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

are to let the arrows of divine truth fly full and strong, and straight to the 
mark. You must put your life into your work. Soul and body must go 
together. The vast majority of men appreciate nothing purely intellectual. 
Only through the stir of the emotions, and the physical energy of the man 
who addresses them, will they be awakened to attend to the truth he 
preaches. If you cannot reach them by preaching, then reach them by 
private and personal influence. Be all things to all men, if by any means 
you may save some. Do not be fettered by traditional rules of ministerial 
conduct, when these bar your access to men's hearts. Devise new methods, 
set on foot new enterprises. No Fabian policy, in the conduct of this war- 
fare. Not simply to "hold the fort" that is already ours, but to "storm 
the fort" of the enemy — for this are we sent. Christ holds us to this 
putting forth of practical force, this doing of aggressive work, and here is 
the field for Christian courage. 

And now all this would be at the hazard of the preacher's own salvation, 
if there were not a third work of courage. I mean spiritual living. No one 
but he who has tried it, knows what courage it takes to live a spiritual life 
above the average standard of the community or the church. You never 
know the bitter hostility of the world to Christ, until you see households 
divided, and enmities occasioned, by simple faithfulness to the Master on the 
part of some one of his disciples. The church too often is willing to bear 
the ministrations only of one who will speak kindly of its sins, and not too 
urgently of its duties. Simply to give to secret prayer the time that is abso- 
lutely necessary to nourish one's heart, in this age of predominantly outward 
activities, requires in the minister a continual struggle. To live so far above 
his people that this struggle shall have ceased and prayer be his life — this, 
to the mass of Christians, is unhoped for and almost unheard of sanctity, — 
and the demand that they should come up to a standard so lofty is an irri- 
tating impertinence. To contend against these resisting influences requires 
that Christ's servant should die daily. Yet without thus contendiug, how 
can his ministry be other than a failure? He is to lift men up to a higher 
life. How can he do this, unless he lives that life himself? Nothing but a 
high-hearted boldness, a very sublimity of courage, will enable even a min- 
ister of the gospel in these days to meet the first and most fundamental 
demand of his office — the living of a spiritual life. 

You know whither these remarks are tending. Christ has made provision 
for all these sublimities. The passive courage that we term patience, forti- 
tude, endurance ; and the active courage which we term independence, force, 
spirituality, — both these are given to us in Him in whom we are complete. 
There is a boldness which consists of meekness and humility — the boldness 
of the man who knows that he has the truth, not his own truth, but God's 
truth, the truth that the world is dying for, the truth th. t will stand the 
test of the last great day ; the boldness of the man who, by whatever pro- 
cess, has come to the conviction that God has sent him to proclaim the 
truth, that a woe is on him if he preach not the gospel, and that eternal woe 
or eternal blessedness for some who hear him depends upon their acceptance 
or rejection of the message he brings ; the boldness of the man who has 
implicit confidence in God and in his promises, who believes that God is 
with him in his preaching, helpiug him to speak and helping his hearers to 



1878: TRUE DOGMATISM. 



557 



hear, and who therefore declares to men with a solemn rejoicing the whole 
counsel of God. And this boldness, my brethren, so magnificent in its nature 
and in its results, the very crown and summit of all gifts of God, this is no 
dream of a wild imagination, but the rightful possession of every one of us 
whom Christ has put into his ministry. 

Courage, th. -n, in its essence as well as in its etymology, is a matter of 
the heart — the possession only of him whose heart is one with the heart of 
Christ. It is not a thing of native endowment alone, nor simply a product 
of reason and experience. The true courage of the Christian minister has 
its chief source in that divine Person who has constituted himself the heart 
of our heart and the life of our life. My brethren, if it were in my power, 
I would pour out upon you such fullness of grace and strength for the work 
before you, as should leave you never for a moment conscious of intermit- 
tency or lack. What I would do but cannot, Christ can do and will. I 
point you to Him as the only and the unfailing source of courage. It is for 
you now to point others to Him. Do it with such zeal, such determination, 
su'-h faith, such self-devotion, that over yon, when you die, may be said 
those words which were spoken at John Knox's grave: "'Here lies one who 
uever feared the face of man." 



1S78: 
TRUE DOGMATISM. 



Bbethee>- of the Gradcatlxg Class : — The Providence of God that has 
brought you by varied but converging ways, first to your meeting, as stu- 
dents, and now to your parting, has doubtless been preparing your work for 
you, as well as you for your work. God's Providence and God's Spirit sup- 
plement each other. As each age rises, new men arise to take the lead of it 
and to turn its activities into Christian channels. The preachers of a past 
generation give place to the preachers of the modern time, because of the 
great law that men are influenced most by those who are in sympathy with 
them. The everlasting gospel is everlasting because of its power of endless 
adaptation to the conditions of the humanity it is to save. And yon, who are 
sent out to teach an age different in some respects from any that has gone 
before, must in some respects be different men from God's servants in the 
past, if you are to succeed in your ministry. 'Like people, like priest," is 
a maxim that has a good meaning as well as a bad. As this is an age of 
intelligence, rapid thinking, hatred of shams, you can mould it for Christ 
only by being educated, alert and genuine men. 

But it is to another point that I wish to call your special attention. It is 
an age in which all beliefs that take possession of men's minds, whether in 
science, literature or philosophy, intensely and dogmatically assert them- 
selves. If you would cope with the age's skepticism and indifference, its 
pre-occupation and hostility, you must meet this assurance of unbelief with 
the sublimer assurance of faith ; you must believe something with all your 
heart, and then you must declare it and stand for it, and offer combat to all 
who come. To this doubting, questioning time, you must present some- 






558 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

thing beyond all doubt or question — the eternal truth of God, — present it 
with the true dogmatism of an unwavering faith. Then your faith shall be 
contagious, and those who hear you shall believe and live. 

Is there a body of definite truth for which you may thus safely stand? 
And has this truth laid hold of you, so that you glory in nothing else but the 
preaching of it? These are the two great questions. I trust your course of 
instruction and investigation in this Seminary has settled the first one for 
you. I know that there are many ''winds of doctrine" at present blowing; 
much doubt whether the apostles fully knew whereof they affirmed, and 
whether even Christ's teaching was not an accommodation to his times. 
There are many who question whether we can be sure enough what the New 
Testament teachings are, to warrant us in drawing a hard and fast line any- 
where, and saying 'This is truth," and "That is a lie." But just this, John 
did — that Boanerges whose love could brook no slight upon Christ or his 
truth. And we have failed in our teaching, if we have not awakened within 
you a new and profound conviction that a magnificent and organic scheme 
of doctrine is made known in the Scriptures — a scheme of doctrine whose 
foundations are the nature and decrees of God, whose various parts have 
fixed and unchangeable relations to each other, and whose structure towers 
above all human systems and embraces truth with regard to heaven as well 
as with regard to earth. 

One of the Bampton Lecturers, Garbett by name, has pointed out very 
clearly a distinct inculcation of this principle by one of the apostles. In an 
age of heresy and conflict Jude exhorts his readers to "contend earnestly 
for the faith once for all delivered to the saints." Notice how much is implied 
here. First, he assumes the existence of a definite and well-known body of 
truth called -'the faith." The belief of the church was not something vague 
and changeable, but it consisted of a clear and organized mass of religious 
doctrine, distinctly separable from the errors that assailed it. and recognized 
hy all believers as characteristic of the Christian church. Secondly, this 
body of truth is characterized by completeness and finality ; it is not sus- 
ceptible of addition or diminution; it is the faith "once/' or as it should be 
translated, "once for all, delivered to the saints." Thirdly, there is an 
authority about it, because it has not originated in human reasonings or in 
human speculations, but has been given from above: it is "the faith once 
for all delivered," by God. And fourthly, this faith has been given as a 
sacred trust to a particular body, namely, the church, that they may keep it 
and defend it, — the faith has been "delivered to the saints." And thus we. 
as ministers of the church, are trustees, and into our hands this priceless 
treasure has been put, to ensure not only its safety and purity, but its uni- 
versal diffusion through the world. What can humble us. what can exalt 
us, more than this, that we who are "less than the least of all saints," are 
yet chosen to be "stewards of the mysteries of God." and that "this grace 
is given us," that we might present "the unsearchable riches of Christ"? 

You have the objective faith — the system of divine truth; have you the 
subjective faith — the confidence and zeal that will lead you to devote your 
lives to its propagation and defense? This is the last question. I Invite 
you to severe self-scrutiny, while you answer it. There is much to weaken 
this faith in our day. The skeptical habit is the prevalent habit of the time. 



1878: TRUE DOGMATISM. 559 

The oldest and most settled beliefs have become open questions. God and 
conscience, heaven and hell, are all marked with interrogation -points. Dog- 
matic reviews have given place to critical journals in which doubters and 
disputants hold prolonged symposia. Laxity of doctrine — aye, scorn of 
doctrine — is epidemic. I beg you, stop where you are and go no further 
toward the work of the ministry, if you are not ready to meet this half-ques- 
tioning, half-denouncing spirit, with faith in the living Christ and in the 
absolute truth and saving power of his word. If you have still the idea that 
Christian doctrine is dead dogma, that it is a human invention instead of a 
deliverance of God, that it weakens the human intellect instead of nourishing 
it with its proper food, and fetters the mind instead of expanding it with its 
vital breath, — in fine, if to contend earnestly for the old faith seems to be 
dogmatism, in the narrow and mean sense of positiveness where there is no 
certainty, — then turn back, the pulpit is no place for you. But, if you know 
whom you have believed, if God has revealed his Son in you, if you have 
indubitable assurance that the Scripture doctrines of sin and salvation are 
the very truth of God, then go forward, — declare the whole counsel of God : 
whoever may refuse to hear, God's Spirit will make your word a word of 
power, and you shall both save yourselves and those who hear you. 

One year ago this evening the class that preceded yours stood in like man- 
ner before me. How well we remember one of the members of that class, 
the manly but gentle, the noble but modest, Albert J. Lyon. As I think of 
his tall and graceful form, and then of the thorough scholarship and deep 
devotion that he showed in his Seminary course, I thank God that I was 
permitted to instruct him. He gave himself to the work of missions. With 
all the ardor of his ardent nature, he went across the intervening oceans to 
Christianize and civilize a mountain tribe in Northern Burma. God spared 
his life just long enough to permit him to see in the distance the hills where 
he had expected to labor, and there, before the first year was over, he was 
called from work to rest, from labor to reward. How pathetically and 
impressively his example speaks to us to-night ! Out from that new-made 
grave the other side of the sea there comes a voice, speaking to us of the 
glory of a Christian service performed under the eye and direction of the 
great Captain of our salvation, even though that service may only be one of 
suffering and death. May the Spirit that animated him be yours ! If you 
go and continue in that Spirit, your life will not be in vain, even though 
that life be short. 

In this last address, which marks the termination of three years of intimate 
spiritual and intellectual fellowship — years in which you have commended 
yourselves individually and collectively to your instructors as candid and 
faithful Christian men — I bid you for my last admonition to be true dog- 
matists; not dealers in negations, nor fanciers in literature, nor liberalists 
in doctrine ; but positive preachers of a positive faith. Listen to no theory 
of development which would add to or take from the written word ; and yet 
let every sermon that you preach show that the old truth has had a new and 
living development in your apprehension and experience. "Be not ashamed 
of the testimony of our Lord." Be satisfied with the breadth of his mercy. 
Proclaim his terms of salvation. Preach his gospel as the final and the only 
hope of the sinner. One only life is given you to live. Let the "Woe is 
me!" sound through it. Let it be said that for you "to live is Christ." 






560 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

Then, whether your lives be long or short, whether you labor on Christian 
or on heathen soil, whether your apparent success be great or small, you will 
be sure of the "honor that comes from God only." There is a day whose 
splendors will outshine the brightest triumphs of the world. Not for the 
present time, with its flatteries and its pleasures, let us live, but for that day 
when one approving word from Christ our Lord with well repay a life-time of 
suffering for his truth. With hopefulness, but with solemnity also, go to 
work as ministers or servants of the word. — for by that word you, as well 
as those to whom you preach, will be judged at the last day. 



1879: 
GOD'S LEADINGS. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class : — You have reached the end of a 
long course of preparatory study. The most of you go now for tlie first 
time to be pastors of churches at home, or preachers of the gospel abroad. 
To all of you, I do not doubt, this breaking with the old. and entrance upon 
the new, is a time of serious self-examination. You recognize your weakness 
and unworthiness, and say, "Who is sufficient for these things?" But at 
this crisis of your lives you feel also the stress of Providence. Another hand 
has guided you. A thousand converging lines of divine influence find their 
focus at the spot where you now stand. You perceive that there is no real 
significance in this hour, unless God has had to do with your past life and 
will have to do with your future. As you look out upon that future, you see 
as you never saw before, that you need to be led by God. My last words to 
you will have this for their subject: — "God's Leadings of His Servants in 
the Ministry." 

There is an external leading of God's Providence, of which the subjects of 
it are unconscious. He leads the blind by a way that they know not. He 
ordered your birthplace, your early associations, your later experiences. On 
some slight influences, such as a casual meeting, the loss of a letter, a shower 
of rain, a trivial indisposition, the caprice of a friend, you now see that your 
whole earthly career has been made to depend. What caused you to choose 
the ministry? A very little thing may have turned your thoughts toward it at 
the first. As you have gone on in life you have been gathering up the threads 
of the past and weaving them into a definite pattern. You have begun to 
see the meaning of incidents in your history which you could not understand 
years ago. All through David's early life with its varied experiences and 
wonderful vicissitudes — shepherd-boy, outlaw and monarch, by turns — we 
see how God was fashioning a heart to sing such songs of sorrow and rejoic- 
ing as might be the vehicle of his church's devotions through all coming 
time. In Luther's obscure origin and literary ambition and monastic strug- 
gles, we see how God was preparing a familiar but powerful voice for the 
great German discontent with Papal corruption of Christianity. God was 
in the whole complex mass of events that prepared the way for the Jewish 
kingdom and the Protestant Reformation. But God has been equally in Ah- 
past influences which have shaped your lives. Evil has been overruled for 



1879: GOD'S LEADINGS. 561 

your good. Sorrow has softened you. Difficulties have awakened new 
energy. Even your own sins have shown you your weakness, and the weak- 
ness of mere human nature. The way has opened before you, when every 
earthly power conspired to close it. God has gone before you, as truly as He 
led those Israelites hy a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night. 

On the front of an ancient house in the city of Chester. England, is an 
Inscription that comes down from old Puritan times: "God's Providence is 
our Inheritance." Take this for your encouragement to-night. If you go 
ou God's errands, God's Providence will work for you. It is hard to preach 
without this. To stand alone in a universe of evil influences, all combining 
to thwart your efforts and kill the seed you sow, this is enough to discourage 
the most earnest and patient soul. But this is not your lot. The minister 
of Christ has the assurance that aW things work together for his good, and 
for the good of the cause for which he labors. No sooner does he put his 
hand to God's work, than He to whom all power is given in hoaven and earth 
makes all the forces of the universe conspire to further his labors. No word 
that he speaks shall be useless. No weapon formed against him shall prosper. 
His eyes may be blind to them, but there are horses and chariots of fire round 
about him. The world and life and death are his servants, and the kingdom 
of God Is advanced by his seeming failure, as well as by his seeming success. 

It is a great thing to have this external leading of God, and many a stal- 
wart worker has had it without knowing it. But I wish to impress upon you 
to-night the fact that you may have something better even than this, namely, 
an internal leading of God — a leading of his Spirit that supplements the 
leading of his Providence. God's Providences are dark to us, until his 
Spirit interprets them and brings us into harmony with them. But it is 
possible to see God's hand in the events of every day, to discern the signs 
of the times, to be filled with the knowledge of God's will. This is the work 
of the Holy Spirit. As I have said to you elsewhere, he interprets to us 
God's Providences as he interprets to us God's Scripture. He presses our 
own powers into the service. He energizes our own faculties, so that we 
exercise a common-sense that after all is very uncommon, and a judgment 
free from selfish bias. And the result is that while we never allow ourselves 
to act blindly or irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with 
regard to duty, the Holy Spirit gives us an understanding of circumstances, 
a sense of God's providential purposes with regard to us, which makes our 
true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain 
it to others. So God points out to us the place, the time, and the method 
of our work. No great servant of God has ever lived who was not at times 
seized with a spirit of desire and prayer, such as no powers of his own nature 
could account for, and then with impulses to do and dare for God, such as 
worldly men and even uninstructed Christians would call madness. But 
wisdom is justified of her children, and myriads of times in the history of 
his church, God has shown that the seeming madness was foresight, and 
that the audacity of his servants has struck blows for truth that resounded 
throughout the world. 

Do you know anything more magnificent, my brethren, than a life in which 
the external leading of God's Providence is accompanied by a constant 
Internal leading of his Spirit? Do you think it some extraordinary and 
36 






562 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

inaccessible grace, to which you may not aspire? Not so. "As many as are 
led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God." This grace belongs by 
right to all ministers and to all Christians. You believe in each element 
separately. I call upon you, as the condition of highest success in your 
ministry, to believe in both at once and together. Realize your relation to 
Christ, and you can believe in them ; for Christ is not only the external ruler 
and administrator of God's providential government, but he is also the 
inspirer and director of his people. In Christ, the two poles touch, and like 
the positive and negative wires of a battery, their meeting results in the light 
and heat of an intelligent Christian activity. Christ outside of us by his 
Providence pushes on the whole mass and movement of the world; Christ 
inside of us, by his Spirit, pushes «s on, so that we keep abreast of our 
time — nay, lead it — for Him, to his own ends of glory and salvation. 

To be up with the times, in this sense, is truly to live. A ministry that is 
not thus led by God is worse than useless. One touch of God's finger can 
give you more of strength than all the self-moved efforts of a life time. The 
inspiration of the Almighty can give you more understanding than all the 
wisdom of this world without it. Will you, by obedience and purity, keep 
yourselves open to divine suggestions, or will you go out to your work in 
the impotence of your own natural powers, to misrepresent Christ, to lead 
astray the immortal beings who look to you for guidance, and perchance to 
be castaways yourselves? Brethren, I am persuaded better things of you 
than this. I hear you cry with Moses, "If thy presence go not with me. 
carry me not up hence!" And I hear God's voice of answer, "My presence 
shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest!" 

Go then, my brethren, to the solemn work before you, strong in the Lord 
and in the power of his might. Because you have God's Providence for 
your backer, be hopeful and aggressive. Because God's Spirit leads you 
on, let no rebuffs or defeats dishearten you. Persist and conquer. God will 
provide places for you, just as soon as you are prepared for places. Seek 
them from God, more than you seek them from men. Hold them as God- 
given, when once God brings them to you. So, serving your apprenticeship 
to his ministry in your early years, and serving your generation by his will 
through life, you will find at last, with a great number who have been saved 
through your labors, that as Christ by his Providence and Spirit has prepared 
you for heaven and a crown of righteousness, so he has prepared heaven and 
a crown of righteousness for you. With the earnest prayer that this may be 
so with each of you, I bid you, for myself and on behalf of the Faculty of 
the Seminary, an affectionate farewell. 



18S0: 
SELF-MASTERY. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class : — When our Lord sent out his 
eleven disciples to subdue the world, there was only one thing that prevented 
its looking like the prelude to a tragedy, and that was that they obeyed him. 
A few perfectly disciplined soldiers are stronger than a mob, and a little oand 



1880: SELF-MASTERY. 563 

of Christians who move at the word of Christ can beat down all opposition. 
As you go out to-night to reinforce the noble army of his ministers, we have 
hope for you because we trust that you have got yourselves under control. 
We know that if you have mastered yourselves, you can master the world. 
And this is the theme of the few remarks I make to you in parting: — Self- 
mastery essential to power in the ministry. 

What sort of self-mastery, each one of you knows for himself better than 
1 can tell him. All your experience and all my teaching has been in vain, if 
you have not learned that self is our worst enemy ; that Satan has no power 
over us except when he finds an ally within us ; that this traitorous element 
inside the citadel lurks in different places in different men; and that, where- 
ever this is, there the fight for self-mastery must be fought. Christian 
ministers may find their besotting sin in the indulgence of bodily appetites. 
An excessive vitality may find mere common food and drink a source of 
temptation. Defective vitality may look to stimulants for strength, Consti 
tutional indolence may need the continual spur of strenuous resolve. Ex- 
citable passions may need the constant bridle of watchfulness and prayer. 
1 say to you, my brethren, that if you cannot conquer yourselves, on this 
lowest plane of mere physical habits, the ministry is no work for you. No 
man can bring others into subjection to Christ, so long as he is a slave 
himself. He need not be an ascetic, but he must keep the body under — like 
the boxer, strike it under the eye and make it his servant — lest, after 
having preached to others, he should be himself a castaway. 

There is another sort of self-mastery which pertains to the intellectual 
being. There is no success in the ministry, for the man who cannot use his 
own mind. The preacher who compels the attention of this intensely active 
generation must know how to think. Thoughts, and not pious phrases, must 
be the staple of his public address. But thinking, until it becomes habit 
and delight, is the hardest of work. The power of thinking can be attained 
only by giving over the nursing of one's moods, and by setting one's self 
resolutely to do each day's task of study or of prayer. Let me exhort you 
from the very beginning of your ministry to have your fixed hours — the 
earliest and the best hours — for actual grappling with the great subjects of 
preaching. Abhor dawdling. Give yourselves no rest, until you have made 
your minds facile instruments to do your bidding. There is no recipe for 
driving out evil, like keeping the mind full of the good. Enthusiastic 
absorption of one's self in study and in work will scatter the whole brood of 
low desires and frivolous ambitions which crowd into every vacant corner of 
the soul and clamor for dominion. Of all men, the minister of Christ needs 
most to keep his own heart, lest the voice of flattery, or the love of power, 
or the attractions of society, or the pursuit of abstract truth, or even the 
selfish seeking of his own personal religious joy, should draw him aside from 
his one duty of publishing Christ. The surface of the ocean which men can 
see is nothing to the great invisible depths. God demands the consecration 
to himself of the hidden world of the thoughts. And no Christian minister 
is safe himself, or a safe teacher of others, who does not feel the deep neces- 
sity of bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. 

There are other regions still in which self-mastery is a condition of success, 
but I can mention only those which have to do with the will, and which 



564 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

require not so much active exertion as they do submission. Many a man 
fails in life because he is bent on acting upon some merely ideal plan, and is 
unwilling to work under actual conditions. This is rebellion against divine 
Providence, and argues pride and selfishness — not nobility of purpose. The 
first lesson for the statesman and for the pastor alike is that he must take 
things as they are, and consult the practicable. Be may do this, without at 
all lowering his standard of right, or altering in the least his fixed determi- 
nation to realize that right in ultimate practice. Bat he has certain consti- 
tutional limitations of talent; his opportunities are narrower than he might 
desire; his helpers may be few. He may find that he is misapprehended 
and opposed ; that those for whom he works need a process of education, 
before They can accept his standards or enter into his plans ; that the imper- 
fections and negligences of Christians are directly in his way. There are 
two wrong methods of dealing: first, that of denunciation, and secondly, 
that of despair. The first is the failure of passion ; the second, the failure 
of unbelief. The servant of the Lord, on the one hand, must not strive, — 
ill-temper is confession of defeat ; nor, on the other band, must he abandon 
the conflict, — abandonment is defeat. But the true way is the way that is 
hardest to mere human nature — the way of self-restraint, of patient prepa- 
ration for victory, of giving up one's own will and plan, for the time, until 
others can be trained to adopt and further it. Our democratic church-polity 
is a very good system for very good people. But sometimes the people are 
not very good. Then our polity is the best of all schools for the minister. 
But how will he ever pass the test, unless he has learned to rule his own spir- 
it? Xenophon tells us that the youthful Cyrus was taught to obey, in order 
that he might know how to command. Be willing to bide your time, my 
brethren. Do not let the first breath of trouble in your churches frighten you 
from your posts. Stand by ; be masters of yourselves, though it cost you day- 
of bitterness ; hold on to God and to the truth, and your submissive pv 
ence. your humble boldness, your contagious faith, will bring even your ene- 
mies to rally as one man to your support, or will deprive them of all power 
to hinder your triumph. These victories over self are the greatest victories 
gained in this world. No paeans are sung over them, but God sees them 
and blesses them, and the conquest of their own wills, on the part of his 
ministers, is the precursor of conquest for the cause which they serve. 

These are the various spheres in which the minister of Christ must be 
master of himself. Why must he thus conquer himself? Because this only 
can give him conscious sincerity. No man can fight a devil outside of him. 
when he is harboring that same devil in his own heart. He must cast out 
the devil from within, or the outward struggle will be only a pretense. And 
he will be more or less conscious that it is a pretense. It is a dreadful thing 
to face — those hundreds of scrutinizing eyes that peer into your soul from 
the public audience — a dreadful thing to face, when you are not quite honest 
with yourself. Ton thought you were going to brave it out. with superficial 
fervors or with curious intellectualisms. But ah. the very sinews of your 
strength are cut, — you are divided against yourself; the secret sin is bla- 
zoned before your eyes, if not before the eyes of your congregation ; yon 
might as well be dumb, so far as effective speech is concerned. What vom 
want is such conscious sincerity as shall enable you to throw yourself and 



1880: SELF-MASTERY. 565 

your whole life without reserve into the battle, — but a miserable simulacrum 
and shell of yourself is all that is left you. And so we have the preaching 
of compromises — compromises with fashionable customs, with smoothly- 
named immoralities, with current skepticisms, with novelties in church- 
order or church-disorder. The truth is, that no man can possibly preach 
the cross of Christ and all that cross represents, ■ unless he has been and is 
crucified with Christ in his own personal life. The Jesuits did well when 
they prefaced all public work by that long retreat for self-mortification and 
self-renunciation. And the Church, the true Society of Jesus, should not 
think its ministers qualified for service, until they have so mastered them- 
selves as to bear about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus. 

Only such self-mastery can enable the preacher to impress others. Men 
look at the preacher, and their first question is: 'What is there in him? 
Has he any religion — anything different from what we have ourselves?" 
He needs to answer that question by showing in his own person two things : 
first, the penetration and spirituality of God'e law ; and, secondly, the con- 
quering power of the personal Christ. How can he be an example of what 
God requires, unless in his measure he presents like Christ the law of God 
drawnout in living characters? How can he be an example of what Christ 
can accomplish, unless he shows in himself that desires and affections, habits 
and inclinations, which he once could not conquer, are brought now into 
subjection, and that he is a victor, inviting others to come and share in his 
triumph and rejoicing? Oh, my brethren, the youug men of your congre- 
gations will learn more from your personal habits of self-indulgence or self- 
denial, than they will ever learn from your sermons ! Only as Christ leads 
you in triumph, will you be able to induce others to swell his conquering 
train. And your preaching, whether true or false, cannot be indifferent in 
its results. It will either be a savor of life unto life, or of death unto death. 
Most of all, it is important to remember that only the self-ruling spirit can 
secure for a minister the favor and blessing of God. For God sees the heart. 
He knows whether it is truly submitted to him ; though man may not see 
through disguises, God does. We have learned, I trust, that it is not our 
talent or administration that wins true success, but only the mighty working 
of his Spirit. Oh, the absurdity and madness of expecting success in the 
ministry, when our own being is a chaos of warring elements, not subject to 
our true selves nor to God, and so not able or worthy to be made the channel 
for God's grace to flow in to others ! It was well for Mr. Moody that he 
resolved to show in himself how much God was willing to do through a man 
perfectly consecrated to his service. Are you willing, my brethren, to bring 
your whole being under control, in order that God's Spirit in its fullness 
may rest upon you? 

And now how may this self-mastery be acquired? We do not endanger 
the divine side of the truth, when we say that there is requisite a resolute 
will. Christianity does not make man a self-less organ of God's working. 
We are not to lose our wills, but, in a true sense, to have more of will than 
ever before. God works in and through a man's working. Your true selves 
must rise up against the false, and put these down. But then all this, in 
sole dependence upon him who worketh in us. In Christ alone do we find 
oiir true selves, — in him alone attain real freedom and power. This trutli 



566 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

of union with Christ, as you well know, has been the centre and burden oC 
my teaching. 1 bring you to it once more at this critical moment of your 
lives, when like the king of Babylon, you stand at the parting of the ways. 
In that truth lies the solution of all mysteries, the answer to all perplexities, 
the overcoming strength for all conflicts, and specially for the conflict with 
yourselves. You desire to know how you may attain this self-mastery? The 
answer is: "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with its affec- 
tions and lusts." Christ has himself conquered, and he waits to make you 
partakers of his victory. By faith receive him, and you shall be more than 
conquerors through him that loved you. Only the Son of God, joining his 
almighty wisdom and strength to yours, can enable you to subdue yourselves. 
But he is able to save, unto the uttermost, all them that come to God 
through him. 

My dear brethren, we have loved you. and have followed your course with 
the deepest interest, until now. But love itself prompts us, as we look on 
toward your future, to reiterate this one precept, that you prepare for work 
outside of you, by work in your own souls. The life that is before you is 
but a little thing, and soon over. It may be a mere beating of the air, with 
nothing done, at the end of it. There may be less of purity and strength at 
the end, than at the beginning ; less of thought and of power, both in preach- 
ing and in life. Or, it may be the constantly widening battle-field and victory 
of a constantly stronger combatant — a combatant more believing, more suc- 
cessful, more humble — as the years pass on. And beginning-; make endings. 
He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much. Beginning 
in your own heart and mastering that for Christ, then carrying your victori- 
ous arms into the small field of your first service and winning that also for 
your Redeemer, you shall be preparing for yet wider conflicts and wider 
responsibilities. For though beginnings make endings, they are not them- 
selves the endings. These last are beyond the sphere of sense and time. 
There, he who has been faithful over a few things shall be ruler over many 
things, and they who have mastered self and the world shall be advanced to 
positions of high responsibility in God's great empire. There are bad endings 
and good endings. In the case of every one of you, may God prevent the 
former ; may he grant the latter ! Preaching Christ's gospel, may you save 
both yourselves and those who hear you ! And may you have the evidence 
and pledge of this final victory, in the present daily and hourly conquest of 
yourselves 1 



1881: 

MENTAL QUALITIES REQUISITE TO THE PASTOR. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class: — Some years ago there was placed 
upon the Index Prohibitorius at Rome, a book which bore this title: 'The 
Priesthood a Chronic Disorder of the Human Race." It was a skeptical 
book. It protested against churches, because they so easily became machines; 
against pastors, because they so easily became bishops. And yet the refuta- 
tion .if the book was iu its title. When the priesthood was called a chronic 



1SS1 : MENTAL QUALITIES REQUISITE TO THE PASTOR. 567 

disorder of the human race, it was confessed that there is an instinct in 
humanity Which prompts it to seek religious guidance. The inference should 
have been that a wise and benevolent God will somewhere provide a supply 
for this need in a true ministry of his word. 

You go out to-night to meet this crying want of humanity, and you go 
believing that God calls you. We share this confidence with you. We are 
glad that so many churches are to receive as pastors men so good and true as 
you have proved yourselves to be. We have done what we can for you, and in 
many respects you are well furnished for your work. But there is a training 
which books can never give. There are good gifts which teachers can never 
impart. And this suggests the subject of my brief parting address: — The 
mental qualities requisite to the highest success in the pastorate. Notice 
that I speak of qualities requisite, not for success in preaching only, but 
for success in the whole work of influencing men, whether in public or in 
private. Notice that I do not say "requisite to success," but "requisite 
to the highest success." You must not be discouraged if you seem to your- 
selves to be almost lacking in one or another of these qualities. Notice that 
I do not say "spiritual qualities," but "mental qualities." I speak of those 
only which at least in some degree belong to you by nature, and which it is 
quite in your power to cultivate. Indeed, to a thoughtful mind, one of the 
chief attractions of the pastorate is the stimulus it furnishes to the very 
characteristics of mind and heart which I am about to mention. The very 
work of the pastor for others draws out all parts of his own nature, and 
makes him a living example of well-rounded and developed manhood. 

The pastor is a shepherd, and the business of a shepherd is to care for the 
flock. He is to care for them by being a teacher and example of the truth. 
Now one of the most important of the mental qualities required for this 
work is frankness. The minister of the gospel should, not be a man of 
concealments or evasions. In his preaching he should think right, and then 
he should say out what he thinks. He should be open-minded to receive 
truth, and then he should be open-minded to communicate it. No human 
creature is more despised by discerning men than the trimmer, or the man of 
policy, in the pastorate. They feel that converse with the things of eternity 
ought to give him strong convictions, boldness of utterance, freedom from 
the trammels of party. He should be willing to tell men their faults, if need 
be. He is to "reprove, rebuke, exhort," as well as to invite and comfort. 
If you have the Spirit of Christ, and exercise a wise moderation, you can do 
this without repelling those whom you seek to influence. They will respect 
the man who deals squarely with them. Be sure that in your private inter- 
course with your church there be nothing underhanded. Abhor all wire- 
pulling and indirection. Have good ends, and go straight at them. No 
toadying, and no mock humility. Let no man despise your youth. Take 
responsibility. Stand forth, and do your work. None but a manly religion 
is worth the having. Y T ou wish to cultivate the open and sincere spirit in 
others. Show them an example of noble Christian frankness in yourselves. 

But there can be a frankness that is oppressive and discouraging. It is 
not the fault-finding tendency, which I would have you cultivate. Add to 
your frankness, therefore, as the second quality of mind requisite to the 
highest pastoral success, a hopefulness of spirit. The best men tire at last 



503 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

of minute and incessant criticism. We are saved by hope, and we must trj 
to put hope into those we teach. You are not to be prophets of lamentation, 
nor is it your main business to denounce. Many a man's failure in the min- 
istry has been due to the fact that he had no confidence in the Christian 
character of his hearers. He has dealt with them as if they were reprobates, 
instead of taking it for granted that they were subjects of God's grace — im- 
perfect indeed, but still on the whole intending, when they know God's will, 
to do it. Such dark views with regard to the condition of the church are 
often born of an arrogant and self-righteous spirit. Paul took for granted 
that the Corinthians were saints, and in beginning his epistles he called 
them so. And Paul was not only a gentleman, but a Christian. If you 
would make men better, you must recognize the good which God has wrought 
in them already. Praise your people, then, more than you blame them. 
Show, in public and in private, that you appreciate what they do for you and 
for the cause. Tell them, not only of their failings, but of their excellences 
of character, as Paul did. Speak, not only of needs, but of possibilities. 
Set over against the depth of sin the infinite riches of the believer in Christ. 
In practical matters, take a cheerful view of the situation. Joy wins more 
hearts than tears ever did. A mournful and ascetic Christianity belies its 
very name. Go to your work, then, confident that you will win. Be hopeful 
men, — or, if you are by nature despondent, keep your despondency to your- 
selves, as a weakness and a sin. Be careful not to utter your moodiness and 
your fears, for utterance reacts upon the spirit that prompted it and makes 
it more intense. Since it is Christ and no human leader whom you follow, 
be persuaded that he will lead you to conquest. We can believe all things, 
because Christ is our hope. 

And yet it is possible for a pastor to be frank and hopeful, while at the 
same time he is hard. Frankness and hopefulness may make him rash. A 
driving energy is quite consistent with an unfeeling self-will. As the third 
quality of mind requisite to the highest pastoral success, therefore, I would 
urge you to add to your frankness and hopefulness, a true sympathy. I do 
not mean a maudlin sentimentality ; I do not mean an unctuous graeiousness ; 
I do not mean a quivering sensibility. The sympathy to be cultivated must 
be calm. There should be a certain dignity and sobriety in it. It should 
be a hearty, manly fellow-feeling, that shows itself in helpful words and 
helpful deeds. Who can estimate the power of it, in a pastor ! To be the 
true friend of all his flock, to have compassion for the erring, interest in the 
poor, a smile for the children, a word in season for the weary, a tear for the 
bereaved — this is the pastor's mission ; this will so knit him to his church, 
that separation will seem like death. True sympathy can never be put on ; 
it is an inward grace, a virtue of the heart. A kind natural disposition is 
much; but the tenderness of soul which Christ gives to the penitent and 
saved sinner is more. No merely natural sympathy is equal to the demands 
of your work, my brethren. Paul never could have so longed after his con- 
verts, except, as he himself says, "in the heart of Jesus Christ." Joined to 
Christ, as he was, he was capable of entering into other's griefs and needs, 
as he never could have done without. Unostentatious, jet untiring, his 
love passed all selfish bounds ; he will love them the more, the less he be 
loved. And this is the first question which your people will ask of you, 



1882: ADAPTATION. 569 

namely, " ITas he a Christian heart in him? Does he love Christ, and love 
his people? Has he the instinct of the shepherd, to support the weak, com- 
fort the sorrowing, seek the lost?" May our Lord give you this power of 
sympathy, and enable you to comfort others with the comfort with which 
you yourselves are comforted of God. 

And now these remarks must come to a close. I trust you have seen the 
inner connection of them. I have been speaking of mental gifts — frankness, 
hopefulness, sympathy. I have been urging you to be open, cheerful, warm 
of spirit. You have doubtless recognized that these natural gifts are but the 
obverse human side of those lofty graces of the Holy Spirit which the Apos 
tie to ths Gentiles has joined forever in triple union, namely, •faith, hope, 
and love. And so we have indicated the true source of these human excel- 
lencies of character. Faith will give us frankness; hope will give us cheer- 
fulness; love will give us sympathy. Remember the divine Author of them, 
and look to him. You may easily have your natural frankness turned to 
suspicious reticence ; your youthful cheer darkened into fearful forebodings ; 
your ready sympathies chilled into hardness of heart, — and all this by the 
misapprehensions and disappointments and hostilities of life. You need a 
higher and more constant source of supply than the inspirations of your owu 
hearts. Such a supply you have in the omnipotent Spirit of Christ, — for the 
faith, hope and love which he imparts abide forever. 

We expect you to be a class of preachers. You have shown that you have 
tastes and gifts in this direction. But remember that you are called to be 
pastors also, and accept this last word of exhortation in which we urge you 
to seek from God, and to cultivate by effort of your own, the frankness, hope- 
fulness and sympathy needful to the best success. As you have the source 
of these qualities in the Spirit, so you have the model of them in Christ — the 
frankest, most hopeful, most sympathetic, of all shepherds of the sheep. 
Follow Christ's example. Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock 
over which the Holy Ghost shall make you overseers, to feed the Church of 
God which he hath purchased with his own blood. To this work we now 
dismiss you. May you so perform it, as to reflect honor upon this training 
school of Christian pastors! May you so perform it, to the very end, that 
when the Chief Shepherd shall appear, you sh9« 1 J ree<?ve, at his hands, a 
reward more welcome than any earthly praise — the crown of glory that never 
fades away I 



1882: 
ADAPTATION. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class : — It Is something to have finished 
your course in this Seminary. It argues industry, persistence, capacity. 
We congratulate you. But it is something more, at the end of life to say, 
"I have finished my course," and to look back upon the battle fought and 
the victory won. What is the relation between the work of the Seminary 
and the work of life? It is the relation between science and art, between 
principles and practice. Here you have learned the theory of religion,— 



570 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

there you are to carry out the theory, and to apply it. It is vain to say that 
the preacher can get along without theology. He needs a knowledge of 
theology more than the lawyer needs knowledge of law, or the physician 
needs knowledge of medicine. For theology is nothing more than the con- 
nected exhibition of the facts of God's word. An infidel lecturer has recently 
said that the Aurora Borealis is beautiful, but that it is a poor light to grow 
corn by. God's trnth, however, is not a shifting Aurora, but a steady sun 
light, and no corn can be grown without sunshine. You have been getting 
possession of this truth, or rather, it has been getting possession of you. 
The great doctrines of man's guilt and ruin, and of God's free grace in Christ, 
have assumed new meaning and dignity as you have studied them. They 
have moulded your characters. You have seen their powers in others. Now 
you go to test this truth in a larger field, and in a more independent way. 
Your success will depend, in great part, upon your skill in turning the 
abstract into the concrete, and in applying it to living minds and hearts. 
My parting counsel to you is that you study adaptation. 

A minister of the last generation was once asked by a youthful preacher 
how he should overcome his excessive timidity in presence of his congrega- 
tion. The older advised his younger brother to think of his audience as a 
lot of cabbages planted in rows before him. It is a good illustration of the 
impersonal quality attributed to the preaching of that day. God was con 
ceived to be the only speaker — the only agent. Ministers and people alike 
were but so many cabbages. We protest against this ignoring of the intel- 
lects and wills of men,— it leaves to God no moral realm in which to work. 
We urge on the contrary, as essential to the preacher's success, the recog- 
nition of varieties among his auditors, and his duty to feed each one with 
food convenient for him. Milk for babes, meat for the full-grown, — to each 
his portion in due season. He that winneth souls is wise, and his wisdom 
largely consists in bringing out of his store things new or old, according to 
the special needs of his hearers. There is a sense, of course, in which Christ 
is the one and only need of the soul. But in him is an infinite fullness, all 
the treasures of wisdom. He is to be presented in all his offices, in all his 
relations, as the friend of the poor, the comforter of the sorrowing, the chil- 
dren's teacher, the refuge of the doubting, the forgiver of sin, the guide 
through life, the hope of heaven. All human institutions are to be brought 
under Christ's control. His gospel touches life everywhere, and is to be 
applied to its regulation and uplifting. As in public worship, by a process 
of synthesis, the minister is to gather together all the wants and woes of his 
congregation, and present them before God in prayer, so in his preaching, 
by a reverse process of analysis, he should bring the truth of God to bear 
by turns upon every relation of life, yes, even upon the spiritual condition 
of each individual soul. He is a physician of souls, and if he be a true one, 
he will recognize the fact that no two cases under his care are just alike, 
that no one treatment will do for all the maladies which sin brings in its 
train, that each patient presents a new and peculiar opportunity for the 
exercise of his healing art. 

Allowing, then, the need of adaptation in preaching, how shall we secure 
it? It seems to me that much can be learned from a study of Christ's own 
methods Never in all the world was there such illustration of the •'wore' 



1882: ADAPTATION. 571 

In season," as in Christ's teaching. To him every conjuncture of circum- 
stances was an opportunity, and no opportunity was ever lost. As you listen 
to his words, you perceive that he made every occasion great. A most intensa 
and vivid personality seems to discern, as by a divine insight, the distinct 
and solitary personality of each soul with which it deals, and so, knowing 
what is in man, Christ speaks to that soul words that as precisely meet his 
need, as if there were none other in the universe to whom they could apply. 
So in general, the word of God searches us out, and says, "Thou art the 
man." We must study its directness, its particularity, its exactness of 
adaptation to each varying shade of human character and condition. 

But we should also, by a process of spiritual diagnosis, acquaint ourselves 
with the mental traits and religious difficulties of our hearers,. — for we can- 
not lay claim to any intuitive or divine knowledge. We must study human 
nature, not in a general way, but by close observation and prolonged thought 
of the dispositions, habits, failings, troubles, temptations, of those to whom 
we minister. We should encourage them to make known their wants and 
their aspirations. We should talk over with them beforehand the subjects 
we propose to preach upon for their benefit, so that every sermon shall have 
a living interest to us, and at least to some one soul among our hearers. 
Casuistry and the confessional have had their dark and hideous side. The 
Christian preacher may have the good of both, by discussing the principles 
upon which any given case of conscience is to be decided, and by having an 
open ear and an open heart to the acknowledgments and resolves of those 
who long for some earthly confidant and adviser. All this implies much and 
constant pastoral work, and shows how impossible it is to separate the faith- 
ful preacher from the faithful pastor. He cannot preach to the heart, or 
from the heart, without having first got into the heart. He must know his 
people, in order to adapt God's truth to their special needs. And he can 
know his people, only by prayerfully studying the special cases that come 
before him in his work as pastor. 

A single word with regard to the results of this effort to secure adaptation. 
However imperfectly it may succeed, it will certainly give a reality and 
effectiveness to preaching which would be impossible without it. The ser- 
mon of a year ago will not do now, — it must be made over, pitched to a 
new key, furnished with new points of connection, illustrated from the 
events of to-day, sent home to some new hearts by words that revive its 
memories or suggest its needs. Dronings and abstractions will cease from 
the pulpit, when every preacher has in his heart and puts into his sermon the 
spirit of the text, "To-day, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts." 
There will be a manliness of utterance, a sympathy, an earnestness of appeal, 
when the preacher talks no longer to men in the mass, but feels in his very 
soul that he is addressing live and palpitating human hearts, aye, sometimes 
even performing upon them a work of spiritual vivisection, though the sur- 
gery may be kind and with intent to heal. True adaptation in preaching 
will save us from sensationalism on the one hand — the essence of which is 
the exhibition of the preacher, — for the preacher will be lost in the thought 
of others and of the truth which will help and save them. On the other 
hand, it will save us from preaching over our people's heads — addressing 
some superhuman or inhuman ideal of human nature, while the particular 



D72 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

cases before us are iguored or forgotten. The philosophy that pays no 
attention to facts may be very brilliant and lofty, but it is very cold and use- 
less, — it is also very narrow. Breadth in preaching is only to be cultivated 
by letting it reflect the endless variety of the phases of truth and life, as we 
find them in the great heart of man, and in the heart of Him in. whose 
image we are made. 

We honor Christ and his living word, then, when we seek to show their 
adaptations to the special wants of men. System is good, but it is good for 
nothing when it becomes an idol, when it is preached for itself alone. 1 
urge you to be doctrinal preachers, but doctrinal only in the most practical 
sense,- — men who make doctrine a power to move the will to obedience to 
Christ. I do not know a more glorious vocation than that of preaching such 
a gospel in such a way, of sounding all the heights and depths of human 
experience, of applying the truth of God to all varieties of men so as to heal 
all sorts of blight and ruin in the soul, to summon forth all sorts of beauties 
of character, and to elicit all sorts of praises for Hiin who has made and 
redeemed mankind. May God go with you as you go upon this mission, 
my brethren. May he give you much of his Spirit. May he enable you to 
adapt your proclamation of the old and unchanging truth to the conditions 
End needs of individual men, so that a multitude shall be led to Christ 
through your ministry, and so that your work shall be an integral part of 
that collective ministration of the church by which to principalities and 
powers in heavenly places shall be made known the manifold wisdom of God. 



1S83: 
FAITH THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class : — Your days of pupilage are now 
over, and you are soon to be teachers of the churches. You have been good 
learners here, and this past docility is a guarantee of future power. Before 
any man can preach the gospel, he must receive it as a little child. We trust 
that you thus receive God's truth. You do not create the truth, — God gives 
it to you. Let me now, in these closing words of counsel, remind you that 
the measure of your faith, in accepting the truth and proclaiming it, will be 
the measure of your success as ministers of Christ. 

A different doctrine from this is broached of late — the doctrine that reason, 
and not Scripture, is the final standard of appeal. In recent discussions with 
regard to Eschatology, it has been maintained that plain Biblical statements 
must be denied their full weight in determining our faith, because we cannot 
bring them into harmony with our conceptions of human freedom. Not 
only is everlasting punishment relegated to the category of questionable 
doctrines, but, upon the same ground that they are inconsistent with certain 
assumed metaphysical or moral principles, the doctrine of a common sin of 
the race in Adam and the doctrine of a veritable bearing of the penalty of sin 
in Christ, are declared to be absurd and outworn errors. Instead of asking 
what Scripture says, and taking that as binding upon our faith and our con- 



1883: FAITH THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS. 573 

science, reason is first to determine what is worthy of God, and to take that 
only for Scripture. 

I know well, from our intercourse in private as well as in the lecture-room, 
that this pernicious view is held by no one of you. But there are forms of 
words frequently used which seem to imply it, although those who use them 
would abhor this conclusion. Is reason the criterion of religious truth? 
In a certain sense, yes; in the sense of these critics, no. We can know 
nothing except by our reason, — for the reason is the mind's whole power 
of knowing. But this is a very different thing from saying that we can 
know nothing except by our reasoning faculty, for the reasoning or logical 
faculty is but a small part of the reason. My whole intuitional nature, 
with all my powers of sense-perception and of belief in testimony, lies out- 
side the domain of mere reasoning or logic. "While reason, in the larger 
sense, may be the criterion of truth, mere reasoning never can be. I am 
obliged to accept a thousand facts, in nature and in my own soul, which I 
can never explain. I take them for true, because reason tells me they are 
true, not because reasoning tells me so. 

Now this testimony of my own nature is trustworthy, because it is the 
testimony of God, who made my nature. God is truth, and truth is God. 
Hence the only ultimate criterion of truth is God and God's revelations. 
My nature is a criterion of truth, only as it is in the image of God. Whoa 
my nature becomes perverted, it misrepresents God, — as the colored glass 
misrepresents the landscape, or as the chromatic aberration of the telescope 
misrepresents the stars. Then Christ, the true image of God, the true human 
nature, becomes the real criterion of truth to me, and when he who is the 
Eternal Word speaks his words to me, I am bound to listen, believe, and obey. 

Or, put it in another form. God alone is truth, and only God can make 
known himself, or the truth, to any human creature. How am I to judge of 
what God, or truth, is? Only by what God has told me. How has God told 
me? First, by his revelation in nature, including my own constitution; 
secondly, by his revelation in Scripture. Can I perfectly trust the first? 
Yes, so far as God has made himself known in it, — provided my constitution 
is not impaired or blinded by sin. But here are two fatal difficulties: There 
are many things I need to know, which God has not made known in nature, 
and many of those which he has made known I cannot rightly discern, on 
account of the diseased condition of my spiritual vision. Both on account 
of natural weakness and of moral perversity, my reason is fallible. I am like 
a man partially blind. Some things I must take upon testimony. So my ulti- 
mate criterion of truth must be, not my own reason, but the Scriptures ; not 
what God tells me in my own nature, for that voice is greatly weakened and 
obscured, but what God tells me clearly and externally in his written word. 

I should be the last to deny — rather I should be the first to maintain — 
that in all this process reason is active. It is reason that must feel her own 
weakness and need of superior help ; it is reason that must examine the 
credentials of the revelation that professes to supply this need; it Is reason 
that must accept this revelation and reduce its facts to order and system ; in 
this sense, reason is a preliminary criterion of truth. But reason is not the 
ultimate criterion of truth, because her last utterance and her highest wis- 
dom are to confess her insufficiency, to resign her place of authority, and ta 



574 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

make way for a mightier and clearer revelation of God — the revelation of 
God in the Bible. Henceforth it is the part of reason, not to criticize, but 
to submit. 

To go further than this, and to assert for reason the right to accept or to 
reject whatever of Scripture may suit her preconceptions or her fancies — this 
is to abuse reason. Of all methods of human thought, rationalism is the 
most irrational. To make reason the ultimate criterion of truth, is to assert 
that the finite mind can comprehend and challenge the infinite; that reason 
is the superior and truth the inferior ; that the corrupted revelation of God 
in my nature is more trustworthy than that perfect law of the Lord which 
converts the soul ; that, because man was once made in the image of God, we 
can now construct God in the image of corruptible man. Thank God, God's 
power of giving is infinitely greater than man's power of receiving, and my 
power to take in is not the limit or the criterion of truth. Reason is not a 
latent omniscience, is not a power of discovering or of judging all truth, but 
in its highest activities is rather a power of taking what is freely given to it 
by Him who, with his revelation, provides also the Spirit of truth to 
enlighten our minds and enlarge our faculties to take it in. 

Faith, then, whether in God or in God's word, is the highest act of reason ; 
and this reason, although it is a preliminary criterion of truth, is not the 
ultimate criterion. God's word is the only final standard of appeal. To the 
law and to the testimony, — if reason speaks not according to their voice, it is 
because there is no light in her. With all my heart I congratulate you, my 
brethren, that you have this sure and safe rule by which to test your erriug 
fancies, and to measure the new utterances that claim your credence and 
support. We live in a day when the old truths are questioned, when the 
world's faith is unsettled, when multitudes bow to nothing as ultimate 
authority. Satan's suggested doubts as to the inspiration of the word: "Yea, 
hath God said?" is followed, as in Eden, by the open denial, "Ye shall not 
surely die." The rejection of eternal punishment and the rejection of the 
Bible go together, and both errors proceed from the apotheosis of human 
reason and its elevation above God's word. The man who enters the min- 
istry, professing to be a teacher of Christian truth and a steward of the mys- 
teries of God, while yet he attributes greater weight to the conclusions of 
his own reason than he gives to the plain declarations of Scripture, or who 
interprets Scriptural utterances in some non-natural sense instead of bowing 
to them as the end of all controversy, enters the ministry with a lie in his 
right hand, and can hope to be only a propagator of dishonesty and a means 
of ruin to the souls whom he misleads. But the man who accepts the whole 
word of God as inspired, and fairly interpreting it declares the whole counsel 
of God to men, will not only save himself and those who hear him, but will 
find at last that he builded better than he knew, that his utterances were 
infinitely more true than he thought, that death, judgment and eternity wit- 
ness to their divine and everlasting validity. 

All other human callings have to do mainly with local and temporal Inter- 
ests, and the truth with which they deal is of a partial and inferior sort. It 
is the glory of your calling, my brethren, that you are to preach that word 
of God which liveth and abideth forever, and by which you and your hearers 
alike are to be judged at the last day. It is a sublime vocation. I pray you, 



1884: HABITS IN THE MINISTRY. 57 o 

value your inestimable privilege. And may Christ, who is himself the truth, 
give you grace to preach the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 
truth, so long as he gives you breath, and, when death comes, may you be 
able to say, with Paul, that you have kept the faith and that you have won 
the crown. 



1884: 
HABITS IN THE MINISTRY. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class: — The Faculty of the Seminary 
desire to express to you their appreciation of the faithful work you have done 
during the past three years, and their high hopes for your future. Other 
things being equal, industry and regularity in one's preparatory training 
determine his after success. The habits of the past will follow you as you 
go into your new life. If you have been faithful in little, you will probably 
be faithful in much. Some of you may be conscious that you have not done 
your utmost in your Seminary course. Still you have the opportunity to 
mend. New habits can be formed. As a theme of encouragement or admon- 
ition to all, think then for a moment of habits — what they are, what sorts 
of them need to be cultivated, how this cultivation is to be managed, how 
results justify this cultivation. 

A habit is nothing more nor less than a decision of the will so repeated 
that it becomes easy. You are familiar with the law by which the action of 
one faculty affects all the others. Every volition has its influence upon the 
ideas and upon the feelings, and these last are motives to new volition. 
Volitions, therefore, tend to repeat themselves, — the oftener they are put 
forth, the more likely it is that they will be put forth again. What is done 
at first with an effort, comes at last to be done spontaneously. And so our 
habits are the surest indications of character, because they are the settled 
movements of the soul. Each one of them represents a thousand consoli- 
dated volitions. A good habit is a tremendous power for good. Evil habits 
are the very fetters of the evil one. One of the greatest of our moral tasks, 
therefore, is to turn isolated or sporadic action into habitual action, or in 
other words, to give our transient decisions for the right the continuity and 
moral force of habits. And there is no pursuit in life where this automatic 
movement of our powers is more indispensable to success than in the 
ministry. 

There are certain habits which I urge you to form at the very beginning 
of your ministerial life. One of them is the devotion of a solid hour at the 
beginning of each day to study of the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures. Become 
masters of the Greek Testament. Begin your work at it the very first morn- 
ing that you reach the place of your first settlement. Keep it up, summer 
and winter, rain or shine, sermon or no sermon, sick or well. You are to be 
primarily teachers of God's word; you must know that word through and 
through ; you must be full of it ; you must be mighty in the Scriptures. 
But this you cannot be, unless you devote a part of the best time of every 
day to study of the Bible, apart from any special work of preparation for the 
pulpit. 



576 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

Another habit which I would rc< ominciul von to cultivate from the very 
first is the homiletical habit. And by this I uu an the habit of seizing upon 
every novel truth of Scripture, every suggestion of theological or scientific 
literature, every instructive or bright remark heard in conversation, every 
exigency in public affairs or in the private fortunes of those about you, every 
unfolding of your own needs or desires in secret prayer before God, as mate- 
rial for the awakening, encouraging, admonishing of the flock to which you 
minister. Remember always that you are a teacher, that the teacher must 
first be taught, that God teaches by his Providence as well as by his word, 
that whatever God teaches you, you are to teach others, that whatever inter- 
ests you, affects you, moves you, can be made a means of interesting, affecting, 
moving others. Open your eyes then to see the homiletical significance and 
importance of all your reading and of all your experience; let all the currents 
of your life pour themselves into your preaching; that preaching cannot be 
tame or powerless, which reflects and represents all the passions, hopes and 
endeavors of a live and true man, as he is moved upon by the countless 
influences of God's twofold revelation in nature and in the Bible. 

So much with regard to the habit of taking in. One word now about the 
habit of giving out. I beg you to cultivate the demonstrative habit. Many 
ministers are as busy as bees in gathering, — but the product is shut up in a 
dark hive, — only the smallest portion of it is ever brought out to the light. 
There is a reticence, a shyness, a backwardness in the expression of our- 
selves, that constitutes a subtle foe to all ministerial success. This unde- 
monstrativeness often excuses itself upon the ground of humility, — but it is 
false humility, in men who are set to be ambassadors of Jesus Christ, who 
have the word of the living God to preach, and to whom are promised all 
the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Freedom of utterance is, of course, to a large 
degree, the result of quick thought and ready sympathy, but it is also the 
cause of quick thought and ready sympathy. Here, as well as elsewhere, 
the more we give, the more we have. Learn then to be yourselves, to say 
out what is in you, with manliness of tone, with strength of voice, if need 
be. Let your whole nature, your whole experience, your whole life, in short, 
all there is of you, speak for Christ. 

Only one habit more shall be mentioned — I mean the believing habit. 
As respects your brethren, cherish the spirit of confidence ; take them at 
their best; trust them as men and as Christians. "Believing all things," 
says the apostle. Men will not believe in you, unless you believe in them. 
Some ministers carry about with them an atmosphere of criticism and of 
suspicion. They do not believe in men. And as a result they do not love 
them, nor hope for them. And, so long as you have no confidence in them, 
you can do them little good. How different the open, «herry, sympathetic, 
hopeful spirit that sees, in every Christian, a branch of the true vine, unfruit- 
ful for the time it may be, yet dear to Christ, and still capable of bringing 
forth abundant fruit. But better than the habit of believing in men is the 
habit of believing in God. I exhort you, in this day when the old landmarks 
of doctrine are so frequently obscured by the fogs of speculation, to believe 
in God. The preacher doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that 
proce< deth out of the mouth of God. Believe not only, but glory in believ- 
ing, — make it your business to believe, — be in this respect an example to 



1SS4: HABITS IN THE MINISTRY. 577 

those you teach. As Tetor and John fastened their eyes stedfastly upon the 
blind man. and the courage and faith of their hearts passed through their 
eyes, as it were, into him, so let the spectacle of your faith exert all around 
you a contagious influence, and lead men themselves to trust the healing 
Sou of God. 

I can give only a single sentence to the question how this cultivation of 
right habits is to be managed. It is to be managed by persistent putting 
forth of single imperative volitions, often against the tendency of our natural 
impulses and desires — volitions repeated continuously in dependence upon 
the help of the Spirit of God. And what I say with regard to the advantages 
of such cultivation I must condeuse almost as much. You know what nerve- 
centres are, and how physiologists tell us that by a sort of involuntary and 
automatic action these nerve-centres become lieutenants of the will and per- 
form its behests even while we are apparently unconscious of their operation. 
I give the commaud to walk. There are nerve-centres that take the com- 
mand from my will and execute it, — I go down the street, putting forth no 
further conscious volitions ; these subordinate powers do the work for me. 
The result is that my brain is left free for conversation with a friend, or for 
thought about my sermon. Every habit formed is in like manner a getting 
of the lower powers to do our work, with the result that the intellect and 
will are left free for other and higher concerns. Habits, therefore, econo- 
mize our time and strength. The true pastor's maxim, "Never do anything 
yourself that you can get any one else to do for you," applies to his own 
faculties and powers. Conscious will should never do what it can get any of 
the lower powers to do for it. But it is more than economy, — it is safety 
also. Many a time, when selfish or indolent impulses would rule, they can be 
repressed by the simple thought that this is not our habit. The love of con- 
sistency saves us. Routine is itself a blessing. And these habits, if they 
are only habits of daily pondering God's work, of seeking its applications to 
human life, of uttering its truths to others, of trusting God and our brethren, 
will not only be the surest signs of a sanctified intellect and a self -sacrificing 
heart, but they will powerfully influence us to holiness and self-sacrifice, and 
so make the preacher a living example of the gospel which he preaches. 

Be sure, my brethren, that what you are will influence your hearers more 
than what you preach. I look forward to earnest, persistent, unselfish, 
consecrated lives, to be lived and spent by this Class for Christ and for his 
church. God has been with you thus far, and he will guide you still. Though 
you may be widely separated, the memories of these three years of close 
companionship in sacred studies will be a refreshment and strength to you, 
and you will still be united to one another and to us by that one Spirit 
through whom we all have access to the Father. May God fill your placea 
here by men as good and true, and raise up for the ministry a multitude as 
well prepared for their work ! We rejoice to-night that we have been able 
to do anything towards forming your intellectual and moral habits, in prepa- 
ration for your sacred calling. Be faithful to what you have been taught, — • 
better still, be faithful to the word of God, as the Spirit of God shall show 
you its meaning. Y'ou have been a pride and a comfort to us. Our hearts, 
our hopes, our prayers go with you. We expect, the churches expect, Christ 
expects, noble services from the class of eighteen hundred and eighty-four 
37 



678 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

1S85: 
THE PREACHER'S DOUBTS. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class: — This is an hour of contrasts, a 
time of sadness and of gladness, an ending and a beginning. We part from 
you regretfully, for you have been faithful students of God's truth ; hope- 
fully, for you go to preach this truth to others. You have made your way 
to your present convictions through struggles ; you have gained for your- 
selves a firm assurance of the great truths of Christianity. You believe that 
the Scriptures are a special revelation from God, and that they represent 
God as triune, creating, redeeming and judging the world in Jesus Christ. 
You believe that man is fallen, congeuitally depraved and wholly dependent 
for salvation upon the atoning sacrifice of Calvary and upon the regenerating 
grace of the Holy Spirit. You believe that out of the ruins of this fallen 
humanity God is building up a glorious church, which is to be his temple 
and dwelling-place forever, and that without connection with that great and 
invisible body, of which all earthty organizations are more or less perfect 
types and symbols, men abide in darkness and death. 

But It Is not about your beliefs — it is about your doubts, that I wish to 
speak to you. The preacher's doubts, and what he is to do with them — this 
is my theme. And the first thing I would say is, that Christianity gives place 
and room for doubt. Of course I do not mean that it is right to doubt God, — 
I do mean that it is often right to doubt what men say about him. Jesus 
did not doubt God, but he did doubt the interpretations of the Scribes and 
Pharisees. To doubt God's existence, or to doubt God's word when it is 
clearly set before us, is sin, but when man or Satan says God is so and so, or 
that his word means this or that, it may be a duty to doubt, and doubt may 
be the only road to truth. Though you have a fixed belief with regard to 
the main matters of theology, you well know that there are a thousand ques- 
tions yet unanswered, and with regard to these you are free as the air to use 
your intellects and to interpret the Bible for yourselves. About many com- 
monly received opinions you will have your doubts. Your doubts may be 
a sign of mental progress. You can make the truth effective, only by strip- 
ping off the cerements with which custom has bound it, and by bringing it 
forth In new life and power from its sepulchre. 

But, secondly, remember that while Christianity leaves place and room 
for doubt, the incidents are not the essence of Christianity, and a thousand 
differences of belief about details will not affect the truth of the general 
scheme. Let us never imagine that, because we cannot explain certain appar- 
ent difficulties, the whole system may be a delusion. The astronomer does 
not give up gravitation, simply because the movements of certain satellites 
as yet refuse to be brought under its law. Men may worship securely in a 
great cathedral, although many a superficial stone of its exterior seems 
crumbling and falling from its place. So we are to believe that the founda- 
tion of God standeth sure, in spite of manifold perplexities with regard to 
the details of Christian truth. 

Thirdly, even as respects these minor matters of the faith, remember that 
doubt is not refutation. You are not the first that have seen these difficulties. 



1885: THE PREACHER'S DOUBTS. 579 

Thore were brave men before Agamemnon. The Holy Spirit's enlightening 
influences have been given to others besides yourselves. When you begin 
to doubt accepted interpretations, therefore, do not take it for granted at 
once that your doubts are just. Carry your doubt a little further, and doubt 
yourselves — your perspicacity, the comprehensiveness of your thought, the 
completeness of your induction of facts. Take advice — not the advice of 
doubters like yourselves only, but the advice of men who have worried 
through with their doubts, and who at least think they have got out of the 
quagmire upon solid ground. Read books — not the books of the enemies 
of Christ and his gospel exclusively, for you may so saturate yourselves with 
plausible unbelief, as utterly to unfit yourselves for sober, independent judg- 
ment, — but the books of the great Christian thinkers, the Butlers, the Pas- 
cals, and in modern days the Dorners and the Smiths, of the church. Above 
all, live in the self-evidencing sunlight of the Scriptures ; make the word 
of God the man of your counsel; ten to one, if you will permit it to do so, 
the Bible will explain itself. 

Fourthly, do not preach new doctrine till you have some new doctrine to 
preach. In other words, do not publish your doubts, — wait till they become 
certainties. There is no foe to truth so dangerous as haste, for haste has 
self-will and presumption for fellow-laborers. The Holy Spirit was promised 
to guide the apostles into all the truth, but we know that he did not do this 
by some sudden flash of lightning, but rather by a continuous enlightenment 
as to doctrine and polity, which was not completed until the last apostle died. 
And so the Holy Spirit will guide us into all the truth — but not necessarily 
in three months. Preach no tentative sermons, then, to see how a certain 
new conception of yours will work, — you have no business to try the materia 
medica of the gospel upon your patients in any such fashion. Keep your 
doubts to yourself, until you have solved them and do not need to preach 
them, or until you have found truth and verified it by long thought and 
observation, and can preach it as the very truth of God. 

Fifthly, and finally, work and pray the more, the more you doubt. You 
cannot reach truth in this universe of God without the help of Christ, who 
is the truth. And he will give you his help in finding the truth, only as you 
obey him. Shall a man who doubts, shut himself out from preaching and 
from visiting the sick, On the plea that he must be wholly independent, and 
must give all his time to investigation? Remember that religious truth is a 
matter of the heart, as much as it is a matter of the intellect ; that the cold 
heart cannot judge of it ; that only sympathy for sinning and suffering men 
can prove that we love God ; that without love to God we cannot know God, 
or know the truth of God. The more you doubt, then, throw yourselves 
the more vigorously and devoutly into all manner of Christian service. He 
who does Christ's will shall know of his teaching, whether it be from God. 
The more you doubt, pray the more. For doubts will disappear when the 
obedient servant lays them at the Master's feet ; even on earth his presence 
will give us the best light for our darkness ; and, when at last the day dawns 
and the shadows flee away, it will be heaven itself to hear his word: "O thou 
of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" 

You are stewards of the mysteries of God, sent upon a great commission, 
entrusted with the truth that is to save mankind. You go out into an unbe- 



5S0 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

lieving age — an age that is weary anil hopeless in its unbelief, and that longs 
for nothing so much as the man that can bring positive truth from God, 
answers to the great problems of existence, practical salvation from its sor- 
row and sin. You can win, you can stand, in this age, only by believing. 
In more senses than one, the just nowadays shall live by his faith. That 
faith will be assailed, assailed more subtly and more powerfully than in any 
age before. Doubts will come to you — doubts that will shake you. You 
may treat them in two ways. You may treat them, on the one hand, as 
Othello treated his doubts of Desdemona. You may listen only to Iago; 
you may cast away all you have known in the past of Desdemona' s truth and 
faithfulness, as so much credulity and superstition ; you may condemn her 
on the unsupported testimony of her worst enemy ; you may ruthlessly slay 
her you love best. So you may condemn Christ and his gospel on the word 
of his foes ; you may turn doubt into apostasy ; you may crucify the Son of 
God afresh, and put him to an open shame. But there is another way to 
treat doubts. It is the way of doubting Thomas. He stayed away for a little 
from the assembly of Christ's disciples, but he came back ; he said he would 
not be convinced unless he put his hand in the prints of the nails, but when 
Christ appeared to him he needed no such proof ; he loved the Savior after 
all, and no disciple of them all left us so majestic a confession of faith as 
did this same doubting Thomas, when he bowed at Christ's feet and cried : 
"My Lord and my God." 

My brethren, I do not pray for you that God will keep you from all doubt, 
but I do pray that through all doubt he may lead you into his truth. It Is 
not doubt, but faith, that constitutes God's measure of a man. Romaiue, 
in his diary, speaks of a "year famous for believing." I pray not that one 
year of your lives, but that every year of your lives may be a year famous 
for believing; for be sure that "this is the victory that overcometh the 
world, even our faith." 



1886: 
HIGH MINDEDNESS. 



Brethren of the Graduating Class : — You have now accomplished 
your course of preparatory study. Full of hope and vigor, you are antici- 
pating the public duties of the ministry. I trust that the Seminary has done 
something to fit you for them. You have learned to work here — to work 
from an inner impulse, and not because you were driven. You have gained 
some new knowledge of the great system of truth which you are to commend 
to your fellow-men. Above all, you have become more manly and more 
sympathetic, — you are broader and truer men than when you came to us 
three years ago. Your instructors have seen growth in you, and it is with 
hope and cheer that we look forward to your service for Christ. Much of 
this hope is based upon our conviction that you are high-minded men, and 
that this high-mindedness is of a Christian sort. It is with regard to 
this that I would speak to you. There is a high nrindednesa that Is good; 
there is a high-mindedness that is evil. I would have you cultivate the one; 
I would have you abhor and renounce the other. 



18S6: HIGH-MINDEDNESS. 581 

Let me give you something in Hie way of definition. A proper high- 
mindedness is that which sets the human mind above things naturally infe- 
rior to it, and which at the same time bids this human mind look upward to 
a higher mind and strengthen itself by the reception of what is freely offered 
ns by God. A false and unworthy high-mindedness is that which disregards 
the mind's appointed and secondary place, and seeks to set itself above con- 
fession of sin, above dependence upon Christ, above faith in his word, above 
obedience to his law. We love a truly high-minded man — a man who regards 
the soul as of greater importance than the body, and who, therefore, can 
sacrifice physical comfort and endure hardness for the sake of intellectual 
or moral or religious good ; a man who regards the great things of the soul 
as of more value than the little things, and who, therefore, can care less 
about potty slights, and personal ambitions, and intellectual achievements, 
than he does about the state of his heart before God and the eternal welfare 
of his fellow-men ; a man who regards God's mind as greater than his own 
mind, and therefore accepts trustfully every word of God, whether he fully 
understands it or not ; a man who regards God's will as the supreme will, 
and who, therefore, submits himself unreservedly to the allotments of God's 
Providence; a man who regards God's strength as the only strength, and 
who. therefore, claims no righteousness and hopes for no salvation except 
those which come to him through the atonement of Christ and the sanctify- 
ing influences of his Spirit. 

Here is a high-mindedness that is worthy of praise, for it seeks the things 
that are above, where Christ is, seated at God's right hand. Such high- 
mindedness as this is humble, believing, submissive, while yet it stands for 
God, and defies an embattled world. This was the high-mindedness of the 
Reformers, who feared God so much that they had no other fear ; this is the 
liigh-mindedness of every minister of Christ who, in the strength of Christ, 
preaches his gospel as the only salvation of the world. 

But there is another sort of high-mindedness which makes self the centre 
and standard, rather than God, and that self not the true self, but the lower 
and false self. Such high-mindedness esteems one's own physical comfort 
as more worthy of consideration than intellectual or moral progress, either 
in one's self or in others, and the men who carry this spirit into the ministry 
feed themselves, rather than the flock of God. He would be a poor soldier 
who should refuse to obey the order of his superior, because obedience might 
endanger his life. The chief value of life to a Christian soldier is that he 
may hazard it for Christ. A false high-mindedness overvalues the merely 
intellectual in comparison with the moral and spiritual, — in other words, it 
sets mind above heart. Petty errors of pronounciation, or spelling, or gram- 
mar, are more regarded than weight of argument, beauty of character, or the 
services of a life-time, and for the unity of a specious scheme of thought men 
sacrifice both history and ethics. This sort of high-mindedness constantly 
tends to over-esteem of one's own opinion. Toleration and love for oppo- 
nents, reverence for the great thinkers of the church, consciousness of 
dependence upon the Bible and upon God — these fade out from the mind, 
and the soul is left bare and desolate as a garden when the autumn frosts 
have come. High-mindedness of this sort is rationalistic in spirit, but it is 
also a denial of the doctrines of grace. The man who does not feel the need 



5S2 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

of God and God's revelation in his intellectual life, will not long feel his 
need of God and God's revelation in his moral life. He will come to believe 
in his own merits, and will deny the atonement of Christ, the regeneration 
of the Spirit, and the justification of the Father. Well for him if he does 
not go further, and set his own will above God's will, utterly breaking away 
from the restrains of God's law, as well as from the grace of his gospel. 

The minister of Christ is peculiarly exposed to these dangers, and for this 
reason perhaps, among others, the word "high-minded" is never used in 
the New Testament in a favorable, but always in an unfavorable, sense. "'Be 
not high-minded, but fear," says the apostle. I do not know any exhortation 
more needful to a class of young men just entering upon the work of the 
preacher and pastor. You are to be looked up to as persons of a higher 
education than the mass of your hearers; you are to be esteemed as better 
men than the mass, by reason of the very sacredness of your calling. If you 
have any tendency to be puffed up in your own esteem, the comparative iso- 
lation of your position will give abundant opportunity for increasing this 
tendency, and we unfortunately see in the ministry an occasional instance 
of an opinionated and self-willed man, who is very contemptuous of others, 
and whose whole aim seems to be to lord it over God's heritage. There are 
some natural checks upon this disposition, such as the total absence of ranks 
In the ministry, the fact that many a plain church-member knows more of 
his Bible, and has more common sense in practical matters than his minister 
does, and the certainty that the proud spirit will meet with a fall. God 
usually takes care that the supercilious young minister is in various ways 
knocked on the head until the superciliousness is knocked out of him. 

But how can we save ourselves this heroic treatment? God prefers to 
treat us more mildly, and will do so if we will permit him. I know of no 
way to escape, but by cultivating humility from the very start. And this we 
can do, to some degree, by considering its fundamental place among the Chris- 
tian virtues. "What is the first grace of the Christian character?" was the 
question put to Augustine. And the answer was: "Humility." "And what 
the second?" He answered as before "Humility." "And what is the 
third?" Still Augustine replied: "Humility." And he was right. Humil- 
ity is the first, second, and third, of the virtues, because without it we cannot 
receive any other grace whatever from God. Humility is docile and receptive. 
But high-mindedness is arrogant, exclusive, unteachable, and shuts the door 
both to truth and to duty. 

But we have a better incentive than any which the mere consideration of 
consequences could supply. It is found in the example of our blessed Lord. 
He who was highest took the lowest place. Divine Wisdom at the beginning 
of his earthly life consented to be taught of man, and divine Power at the 
end of his earthly life limited itself until it could endure the sufferings of 
the cross. Have we ever really considered what was the meaning of that 
cross? There in a few brief hours, and in a little spot of earth, were revealed 
the self-affirming purity of God, and yet the self-sacrificing love of God — 
a purity and a love which in themselves transcend all space and all time. 
Imagine for a moment that a cross could be erected that stretched from this 
earth to the most distant of the stars of space. Imagine a Being stretched 
anon that cross whose greatness surpassed that of all the visible universe. 



1SS7: ZEAL FOR CHRIST. 5S3 

Imagine an agony thai lasted for longer periods tbau our minds can grasp 
-sighs of immeasurable duration, and drops of blood that took ages upon 
ages to fall. To some minds this would more fitly represent a divine suf- 
fering, than does the transaction on Calvary. But remember that such an 
atonement as this, though objectively it might be of infinite value, would 
yet be subjectively valueless for beings so limited as ourselves. We could 
not fake it in, — we should be ouly stupefied and bewildered at the contem- 
plation. Therefore divinity has contracted itself into the limits of our 
humanity. God has brought himself within the narrow bounds of a human 
body and a human life. The atonement has been wrought in such a way 
that we can grasp it and be affected by it. Yet it is just as great in essence, 
as if the whole material universe were a cross, and all time were the duration 
of the Savior's suffering. For Christ is "the Lamb slain before the founda- 
tion of the world," and the cross is a revelation in time of eternal facts in 
the nature of God — God's hatred of sin, and yet God's compassion for the 
sinner. 

Denunciations of pride will never help us to humility, — but the contem- 
plation of the cross will. There we see the dreadfulness of sin, — for it 
brought death to the Son of God. But there also we see our sin judged and 
condemned forever, so that now there is "no condemnation to them that are 
in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." 

" When I survey the wondrous cross 
On which the Prince of Glory died, 
My richest gain I count but loss. 

And pour contempt on all my pride." 

In view of what He did, who "being rich, for our sakes became poor, that we 
through his poverty might be made rich," we can give up all for his sake, 
can take the lowest place, can do the humblest work, to fulfill the purpose of 
his sacrifice, and to save the souls for whom he died. As you go out then 
into the active work of the ministry, my brethren, my last counsel to you is 
simply that of the Apostle Paul: "Have this mind in you, which was also 
in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be 
on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, 
being made in the likeness of men ; and being found in fashion as a man, 
he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of 
the cross." 



1887: 
ZEAL FOR CHRIST. 



Brethren or the Graduating Class : — You have spent three years with 
us in preparation for the ministry. Your instructors testify that you have 
been faithful in your work. We send you out with our blessing. We cher- 
ish high hopes for you. May he who has counted you worthy, putting you 
into the ministry, grant you a long, and happy, and successful career, in 
preaching the gospel and in winning men to Christ. 

When I pray that your lives may be ^ong. neither you nor I can forget 



5S4 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

that one who began work with you is not here to-night. Neville graduated 
before you. He knows more theology now than we all. Somewhere, 1 doubt 
not, he is performing nobler service than he could have rendered here. His 
love of truth, his decision of character, his sweetness of spirit — these remain 
in our memory. Though dead, he yet speaks to us — urges us not to mourn, 
not to idle, but to close up the ranks and march on. 

The one word which I would give you as your watchword to-night is the 
word "zeal." It is a lofty word, and our Lord consecrated it when he said 
that the zeal of God's house had consumed him. And yet the word to many 
minds, in this age of easy-going inditTerentism, has an ill sound. Let me 
clear it from misconception, by saying that zeal is not necessarily fanaticism. 
It is zeal for Christ, to which I entreat you. That zeal has none of the 
attributes of fanaticism : it is neither narrow, nor overwrought, nor hard. 
Fanaticism is narrow ; it sees only a small portion of the field ; it makes only 
a partial induction of facts. Zeal for Christ cannot make this mistake, for 
it has for its object Him who is not only the truth, but the whole truth of 
God. Fanaticism is overwrought; it is an exaggerated and extravagant 
enthusiasm; it throws into a single line the mental power and emotion that 
were meant to be expended upon the whole realm of duty. Zeal for Christ. 
on the other hand, can never be overwrought ; for love can never love too 
much when it loves him; all human effort is too weak when matched with 
his infinite claims; strive as we may, we never can do enough to secure this 
highest of all ends — the triumph of Christ and his truth in the world. 
Fanaticism is hard ; the sensibility and devotion which it pours out upon 
one limited part of God's creation it withdraws from all the rest; the Span 
ish Inquisition and the French Revolution show that an uniustructed consci- 
ence may become merciless, and may clothe the executioners of justice in 
hell-fire. Zeal for Christ, on the contrary, as it proclaims, so it is bound to 
manifest, the sympathy and love of God ; is bound to distinguish between 
the sinner and his sin ; is bound to have compassion upon all that are in 
error, that it may enlighten them and save them. 

I do not mean to say that any zeal among men is absolutely pure, — that 
would be to claim that sinless perfection has been reached ; and, alas, the 
imperfection of our views and the fact that our motives are mixed show that 
no such perfect state is ours. But we know that there was once an example 
of fiery, and yet sinless, zeal. We know that the pure flame of Christ's zeal 
has been to some degree enkindled in us. What I urge is, that our zeal for 
Christ may reflect and emulate Christ's zeal for God. Think what its char- 
acteristics were. First, there was an absolute faith. One word of God was 
of more account to Jesus, than all the words of angels or demons or men. 
Mr brethren. I would have you trust Christ and his truth, more than you 
trust all the world beside. Whatever philosophy may say, whatever oppo- 
sitions of science falsely so-called may arise, whatever habit of skepticism 
may have become part of the mental structure of our generation, let us admit 
no doubts, listen to no parleyings, but rather set to our seal that God is true, 
though every man be thereby made a liar. 

And then, secondly. Christ's zeal was distinguished, not only by an absolute 
fa'th, but by a passionate devotion. I urge you to give yourselves to the 
service of Christ, with the singleness of purpose and the *otal self-abandon- 



1887 : ZEAL FOB CHRIST. 585 

ment with which Christ gave himself to God. I do not need to tell you that 
Christ is God. You believe this. I would have you act upon it. Shall I 
give you a motto? Take this: Christo Deo Omnipotenti. Mean by it that 
to Christ, the omnipotent God, you consecrate yourself utterly, making no 
reserve, but giving to him all your powers in the utmost intensity of their 
exercise. O, it is no more than Paul has said before me ! I might have 
takeu this motto instead of mine: Mihi Yiccrc Lhristus — "for me to live 
is Christ." 

I have urged you to imitate and reflect Christ's zeal — that pure flame of 
absolute faith and passionate devotion. A vast and impossible achievement, 
do you say? An ideal never to be reduced to practice by any mortal man? 
True, if it came to us merely as law, and not as gospel ; merely as command, 
and not as promise. I thank God that there is an easier way to fulfill the 
injunction and secure the blessing — an easier way than the hopeless way of 
self-moved and self-sustained obedience. It is by taking Christ himself into 
our hearts. His zeal can become ours, only when he himself becomes ours. 
But then, he can become ours, and like Paul, "we can do all things through 
Christ who strengthened us." Way of the simple! Wisdom of the meek! 
We have learned something of it in the past. May we resolve anew to-night 
that we will have no other wisdom and know no other way, but will "count 
all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ!" 

My dear brethren, it is with a heart of love and hope that I look into your 
faces for the last moments of our relation as teacher and pupils. What I 
have said to you is the greatest thing and the best thing I could possibly 
say. No archangel could give you a message whose substance should be 
grander, more momentous, more stirring than this ; for this Christ in whom 
I have urged you to put absolute faith, and to whom I have urged you to 
show passionate devotion — this Christ is all and in all. There are two 
problems which lie before you for solution — the internal and the external, 
- — and only Christ can help you to solve them. There is the problem of 
your own heart, your own personal sin, your own advancement in holiness, 
in short, your own spiritual life. Unless you can overcome sin within you, 
you can never overcome sin in the world without. But you can overcome 
sin within you, if you have Christ and his zeal. Why does not the ocean 
come up into the river channel and flood the river banks? Because the 
steady outward current drives the ocean waves before it, and takes its tides 
of fresh water far out to sea. How shall you prevent sin from overwhelming 
you and destroying you? By having so much of Christ's life within, that 
you are ever making aggressive movement against the evil, and so thrusting 
its forces from you. Zeal for Christ will leave no room or chance for the 
inflowing of temptation. 

And then there is the external problem, — we must conquer the world with- 
out. There is sin to be convicted, and sorrow to be assuaged, the church to 
be comforted, the earth to be subdued, the kingdom to be given to Christ 
■ — a task as mighty, for hands as feeble, as ever the hands of Christ's dis- 
ciples were in the first days of the church. And yet they "overcame through 
the blood of the Lamb," and so may we. Christ made them partakers of 
his zeal, and so made them "more than conquerors." 

May his Holy Spirit communicate to you this zeal, and keep the fire of 



586 ADDRESSES TO GRADUATING CLASSES. 

love and loyalty ever burning within you. Lay yourselves out for Christ : 
bury yourselves in his work; merge your interests in his; speak, live, only 
for him. Before you, the mountain shall become a plain. At your word, 
dead souls shall live. Millennial light shall begin to dawn about you. The 
kingdom of God shall come. It will make little difference whether your eyes 
see it or not, if only with your dying breath you can say: "'The zeal of thine 
house hath consumed me." For there is another zeal than yours — a zeal 
that can accomplish what you cannot. Of all the other work that is needed 
to supplement our own and to make it effective, we can confidently and exult- 
ingly declare that "the zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this." For 
all our zral, like the zeal of our Savior, is but an effect and manifestation 
of that infinite zeal of the divine nature, which is fulfilling in human history 
the eternal decree that Christ must reign until all enemies are put beneath 
his feet. 



INDEX 



INDEX. 



Abgarus, on tbe picture of Christ 
said to have been presented 

to 203 

Ability, present, not ground of 

sinner's accountability 102 

Ability, gracious, consequences of 
regarding it as ground of 

sinner's guilt, 102 

"Absolute," Mr. Spencer's idea 

of chimerical, 51 

in what sense God Is, 51, 74 

Accountability, not measured by 

present ability 102 

Accumulation of property, rob- 
bery according to Socialism. 4">2 

dangers of, according to some. 452 

Socialistic proposals of its lim- 
itation 453 

the intellectual and moral pre- 
requisite of 462 

Mill's suggested legal limita- 
tions, 462 

has its economical limita- 
tions 462, 4G3 

has its Christian limitations, 
463, 464 

must be subservient to the prin- 
ciples of religion and benev- 
olence 463, 464 

Achromatic lenses, illustration 

from the construction of, . . 445 
Adam, how did he sin though 
possessed of a holy disposi- 
tion ? 108 

difficulty of explaining his fall, 
10S, 109 

had the power of contrary 
choice 108 

chose according to motive, . . . 109 

whence the motive of his 
choice ? . 109 

his being deceived presupposes 
unbelief 109 

the theory that he received 
assisting not supernatural 
grace 109 

his apostasy first internal,.... 110 

his apostasy changed the na- 
ture 110 

his first differed from his sub- 
sequent sins, 110 

his fall cannot be explained on 
any present theory of will, 

108, 110 

his sin, why imputed to us, . . 224 



Adams, Charles F., his educa- 
tional reforms 426 

Adaptation' 569-572 

Adaptation, ministerial, its na- 
ture 570 

its sources 570, 571 

its results 571, 572 

Addresses to Successive Grad- 
uating Classes, 544-586 

"Adequate" cause distinguished 

from "efficient," 92 

Adultery, its punishment under 

Mosaic law 437 

annuls as effectively as death 

the marriage relation 438 

opinions of Roman church re- 
garding 438 

sole valid ground of divorce. . . 438 
its theocratic penalty among 
Jews during Roman domina- 
tion 438 

the action of Christ in relation 

to, 438, 439 

ought to be subject of severe 
legislation 439 

iEsop, one of his fables referred 

to 455 

Africa, progress of discovery in, 
illustrative of researches into 
man's nature 96, 97 

Afrite, and king's daughter, il- 
lustration from 243 

Age, present, one of dogmatism, 557 
its skeptical aspect, 55S, 559 

Aiat of Koran, 146 

Albans, Saint, fable of, 146 

Alchemy, its punishment accord- 
ing to Dante 512 

Alexander, Dr. J. W., on Union 

with Christ, 220 

Alfred, King, on man's goodness, 115 

Allegheny and Monongahela. their 
junction a type of man's na- 
ture 190 

Alps, melting of snow on, an il- 
lustration from 5 

Al-raSebid, see Raschid. 

Alumni, of Rochester Theological 

Seminary, address to, 1-18 

meeting of, sentiments suitable 
to 1. 2 

Amphion, the preacher an 276 

Amsterdam, its pile-foundations 

alluded to 3 

Anagogical interpretation, what? 505 



590 



INDEX. 



Anaximander, his one postulate, 40 
Ancestral experiences, their fun- 
damental value according to 

Spencer 49, 50 

according to Spencer, the 
origin of moral obligation,.. 53 
Andaman Islanders, their sup- 
posed atheism considered,.. 78 
Angelo, Michael, his fresco of last 

judgment, 208 

his universal genius, 550 

Anselm, on development in Gen- 
esis, 45 

"Antecedence," not equivalent to 

"causation," 33 

Anthropological, or moral, argu- 
ment for the existence of 

God S3 

its three parts, 83. 84 

its defects, R4 

its value S4 

holds chief place amons related 

arguments 84 

Apollo, proposed interpretation of 
double legend upon his tem- 
ple at Delphi 4 

Apologia Pro Vita Sua, contains 

a confession of Idealism, ... 7 
A posteriori arguments for the 
existence of God. their 

value S4. 85 

Apostles, their qualifications in- 
cluded both teaching of 
Christ and principally the 

induement of the Spirit 550 

A priori argument for divine ex- 
istence, see Ontological. 
A priori reasoning. Tait on.... 40, 41 
A priori principles assumed in all 

systems of knowledge, 41 

A priori reasoning, its vicious 
use by Spencer and the Cos- 
mic philosophers, 41 

A priori truths, at the foundation 

of knowledge, 4S 

part of the original furniture 

of reason, 48 

sense, the occasion of their 

cognition 48 

according to Plato 48 

presupposed in all experience 

and reasoning, 48 

their denial destroys all phil- 
osophy and opens way for 

universal skepticism 48, 49 

denied by extreme Positivists, 49 
Spencer's explanation of their 

genesis 49 

Spencer assumes their existence 

to destroy their validity,.. 49 
Spencer's treatment of them 

unsatisfactory, 49, 50 

Dr. Carpenter on 50 

A priori judgments, Kant on,.. 60, 61 
Aquosity, a property of water, . . 34 



Arab horse, his characteristics, . . 

Arabian Nights, illustrations 

from, mountain of loadstone, 

Afrite and king's daughter, . . 

enfranchised genie 

Architecture, mediaeval, its origin, 

Aristotle, his influence on the- 
ology, 

Luther's opinion of, 

the parent of scholasticism, . . . 

a theistic philosopher 

on an evil law in our members, 

Arrninian view of original de- 
pravity arises from false 
view of will 101, 

Arthur, Chester A., varied feel- 
ings on his attainment of 

the Presidency, 355, 

an excellent opportunity for re- 
form afforded him :;"•"'., 

Artisans, despised by ancient phi- 
losophers, 447, 

Arve and Rhone, their junction 
a symbol of man's moral na- 
ture 

Assassination of two Presidents, 
summons the nation to a 
considerate standing-still, . . . 

Association, the force of law of, 
illustrated in Crusades, .... 

Assoc-iationalism, as an explana- 
tion of the existence of moral 
obligation, considered, 

Assumptions, Unconscious, of 
Communion Polemics, . .245- 

Assumption, that the practice of 
the church may modify law 
of New Testament, consid- 
ered, 245, 

that there is no complete and 
binding system of church or- 
ganization in the New Tes- 
tament, considered, 246, 

that the ordinances are pure- 
ly formal and external, con- 
sidered, 247, 

that the principle of laissez 
faire will remove error and 
secure peace and prosperity, 
considered, 

Astronomy, why its birth-place 
in the East 

Atheism, sporadic cases of, not 
inconsistent with a univer- 
sal germinal knowledge of 

the existence of God 

I Atom of matter, what, accord- 
ing to Humist 

Atomic weights, an inference 
from 

Atoms, "manufactured arti- 
cles," 

i Atonement, Necessity of, ..213- 



475 

10 
243 
463 
500 

4 
4 
4 



102 

356 

■■;:,! 

448 
190 

347 

4S4 

54 
219 

240 



248 

24S 
473 

78 

59 

6 

44 
219 



591 



Atonement, sufferings of, de- 
manded by righteousness of 

God 213 

demanded by the relations 
which Christ assumed to our 

race 213-218 

required by Christ's race-re- 
sponsibility to the law of 

God 213-215 

willingly rendered by Christ 
because of his regard to the 
vindication of divine right- 
eousness 215, 216 

inevitable because of Christ's 
complete identification with 

a siuful race 216, 217 

only to be satisfactorily ex- 
plained by the doctrine of 
Christ's actual union with 

our race 21S, 210 

the first desire of the awakened 

conscience 219 

Attila, Kaulbach's picture of his 

battle with the Romans,.... 17 
Attributes, divine, their relation 

to the essence of God 189 

have an objective existence,.. 189 

defined, 1S9 

have an active and passive 

side 189 

Auerbach. his stories tinged with 

materialism 31 

Augustine and Calvin, their re- 
spective methods of treat- 
ing divine truths, 4 

Augustine, a Platonist, 4 

perceived the principle of de- 
velopment in the Mosaic ac- 
count of creation 45 

his view of human- liberty 114 

on adding to Original Sin 

through Free Will, 121 

opposes pilgrimages 485 

on humility 5S2 

Aurora Borealis, bad light to 

grow potatoes by 570 

Australian savages, condition of 

women among, 411 

Automatic theory of universe, . . 27 

Goldwin Smith on 27, 28 

its conclusion of despair in the 

words of Tennyson, 28 

Avatar, a temporary incarnation, 209 
Averages, statistical, Buckle's 
and Draper's inferences 

from 23 

the legitimate inference from, 24 

James Martineau on, 24 

Bacon, Roger, not Francis, au- 
thor of the Baconian phi- 
losophy 40 

Baconian philosophy, Its origin, 40 

its method, 40 

a recoil from Greek and Scho- 
lastic philosophies, 40 



Baconian philosophy, its funda- 
mental organon violated by 
philosophy of evolution, .... 40 
Bagehot, on a statue to the first 

sower, 462 

Bain, Alexander, a Positivist, . . 8 

his materialism 31 

on thinking co-existing with un- 
broken physical sequences, . . 46 

a Humist, 59 

Bancroft on the practical influ- 
ence of the speculations of 

Jonathan Edwards 5 

Baptism, a usual metaphor to ex- 
press the rush of successive 
troubles, 229 

a significant symbol, 239 

imports purification through 
death, 239 

a picture of the substance of 
Christianity 240 

associated with Lord's Supper, 
240, 241 

anything which affects its form 
as a symbol affects truth 
symbolized 240 

and Supper are as the twins of 

Hippocrates 240 

Baptism of Jesus, 226-237 

Baptism of Jesus, throws light 

on that of the believer, 226 

its place in his life, 226, 227 

a self-consecration, 227 

a symbol of his death 227 

a proof of his identification 
with humanity, 230 

foreshadowed his resurrection, 231 

the occasion of a manifestation 
of the Trinity 232 

the descent of the Spirit at, 
what it implied, 232 

exhibited the desert of sin, 232, 233 

exhibited a picture of deliv- 
erance 233 

exhibited the method of per- 
sonal salvation, 234 

is an example of public confes- 
sion 235 

Baptists, have truth of Baptism 

committed to their custody, 241 

are bound to be faithful to 
their trust 242 

believe that an adequate mod- 
el of church organization is 
found in New Testament, . . 246 

why they hold to Baptism, . . . 247 

why they contend for the or- 
der of the ordinances 247 

have increased because of faith- 
fulness to convictions, 248 

how they may expect future 
growth 2-13 

purity their primary concern, 
not peace, 249 



592 



INDEX. 



Baptists, theirs, the only reg- 
ularly constituted church . . 249 
Baptists, German, their origin 

and progress 243 

their need of theological schools 300 
Barrett, Elizabeth, her marriage 

to Browning 526 

her death 52G 

Bastian, his theory of spontane- 
ous generation 46 

Bastiat, his contribution to Po- 
litical Science 44S 

on relation of Political Econ- 
omy and Morals, 458 

Bestiality, sin of, according to 

Dante 511, 512 

Beatitudes, absence of warlike 

virtues from, 415 

Beatrice Portinari, her influence 

upon Dante 502, 503 

her early death 502 

the Divine Comedy, her monu- 
ment, 503 

Dante's guide through Para- 
dise, 505, 519 

what she represents in the Di- 
vine Comedy, 507 

the culmination of her loveli- 
ness and of Dante's love for, 

in highest heaven, 520 

Beauty, knowledge and feeling 

combined in its cognition, . . 124 

Bedouin robbers 477 

skirmish with, 4S0 

Bee, its unconscious intelligence, 26 
Beecher, H. TV., on Eternal 

Punishment 190 

"Being, Great," title under 
which Comte proposed to 
worship "Collective Human- 
ity," 13 

Belief in God, necessary to 

morals, 56 

a remarkable fact, 76 

Beliefs, primitive, an original en- 
dowment of mind, 9, 10 

come into activity on occasion 

of external phenomena, 10 

are objects of knowledge 10 

have validity equal to facts of 

sense, 10 

Beliefs, may be held though un- 
expressed, unformulated, or 

even formally denied 76 

may be undeveloped 77 

Berkeley, Bishop, sought to cor- 
rect the materialistic ten- 
dencies of the Lockian phi- 
losophy, 58 

asserted the only evidence of 

matter to be idea 5S 

asserted that sensations were 
the direct objects of knowl- 
edce 58 



Berkeley, Bishop, declared God 
to be the direct cause of 
sensations, 58 

his theory consistent with be- 
lief in special divine revela- 
tion 59 

his fundamental principle only 
further applied by Ilunie, . . 59 

held to spirit because directly 
known by ourselves, 59 

his occasional approaches to 
Humism, 59 

his definition of soul, 59 

his definition of mind, 59 

responsible for our present Ma- 
terialistic Idealism 59 

Sydney Smith's witticism upon, 59 

declares things are thoughts, 61 

a non-egoistical idealist, 62 

his early confusion concerning 
idea as object and act 63 

his later conception of idea as 
object, an archetype in the 
divine mind 63 

the outer world was to him real 
and permanent because an 
expression of the divine 
mind 63 

to him, the non-ego is God 63 

his theory has a radical affinity 
with Realism, 63 

his theory according to Sir 
William Hamilton 63, 64 

did not regard divine arche- 
types as "things in them- 
selves," 72 

his method of securing unity in 
external world 166 

influenced Jonathan Edwards, 168 
Berkeleian Idealism, its influence 

on John II. Newman 7 

Bethlehem visited, 481 

Bethune on Political Economy as 

next to the Gospel, 443 

Beicusstsein — a "be-knowing," . . 80 

Beyrout. description of 474 

Bible, "word made flesh," 153 

to be interpreted as an organic 
whole 154 

its frequent presentations of 
mercy and justice combined, 391 

some of its requirements tem- 
porary 402 

its principles still applicable to 

these days 408 

Bicarbonate of soda, a child's 

questions concerning. .. .425, 420 
Biology, a branch of physiology 

according to Positivism 13 

"Blameless," as applied to New 
Testament bishop, its mean- 
ing.. . . 440. 441 

Blasphemy, its future punish- 
ment according to Dante 5to 



INDEX. 



593 



"Body," as apprehended by the 
intelligence of the common 
people, 67 

Boscovitch, his conception of 

matter 43 

Bowne, a Hegelian, Gl 

Bramante. architect of St. Peter's 

at Rome, 242 

Brassey, advocates the coopera- 
tive system of employment, 457 

Braun, the two principal books 

studied in his Gymnasium, 423 

Brethren, Plymouth, their view 

of church-organization 24G 

Brigg's Colliery, on the cooper- 
ative plan, 455 

Brown, Tom, his return to Rug- 
by referred to 1 

Brown, Sir Thomas, on futility 
of seeking preservation be- 
neath the moon, 473 

Browning. Robert, "'subtlest as- 

sertor of the soul in song." 30 
his statement, "mind is not 
matter, nor from matter, but 

above." 3G 

•' Poetry and " 525-543 

his portrait by Watts 526 

a sketch of his life 526 



his acquaintance with Italy, . 
marries Elizabeth Barrett, . . . 



52G 
526 



loses his wife 526 

a prolific writer, 526 

Pauline, his first printed poem, 526 
Paracelsus, his first tragedy, . . 52G 
the tragedy of Strafford a fail- 
ure on the stage 526 

never popular 526 

severely criticized 526 

is he a great poet ? 526 

hides his own personality 527 

deals with the non-ego 527 

a poet of man, 528 

contrasted with Wordsworth, . . 528 

treats of life, 528 

poet of thoughts and not events 528 
has little tinge of the objective 

or epic, 528 

teaches that "as a man think- 

eth so he is," 528 

his poetry is not lyric, but dra- 
matic, 528, 529 

his dramatic powers seen in the 
poems Spanish Cloister and 

Confessions, 529 

he assists his reader to self- 
revelation, 529 

Is a creative genius 529 

The Ring and the Book his 

greatest work 529, 531 

its plot narrated, 530 

the impression it leaves on the 
mind of the student, .. .530, 531 



Browning, Robert, to what extent 
does he possess the faculty 
of idealization, discussed. 

531-536 

to him all men are ideal 

things, 532 

recognizes human conscience, 

and will, 533 

in his Ixion the victim tri- 
umphs over Jove 533 

in his Pippa Passes the peasant 
girl's song awakens con- 
science, 533 

a believer in a righteous and 

loving personal God 534 

opposes anthropomorphism 534 

in his Caliban on Sctcbos de- 
nounces superstition 534 

in the Epilogue declares his 
faith in an immanent Deity, 534 

in Saul declares 'all's Love 
yet all's Law." 534 

makes Incarnation the high- 
est revelation 534 

the religious topics of which he 
treats in Fcrislitah's Fancies, 534 

has a true idea of inspiration, 
534. 535 

his poem of Saul the best for 
those who are beginning to 
study him 534 

the poem Saul, its subject, .... 535 

his teaching in his Death in 
the Desert, 535 

he. rather than Tennyson, is 
the religious poet of the cen- 
tury 535 

the religious philosopher of our 
times, 535 

Landor's estimate of 535, 53G 

indulges at times in apparent 
levity, 536 

sometimes apparently irrev- 
erent 536 

the motto he adopts for Fer- 
ishtah's Fancies, 536 

treats freely of man's physical 
instincts, 536 

is never ascetic, 536 

never deifies body, 536 

has not a tinge of sentimentali- 
ity 536, 537 

has a protecting sense of the 
ludicrous, 537 

in Dis Aliter Tisum teaches 
that true love is subject to 
judgment and conscience. . . 537 

his books exercise a healthful, 
bracing influence, 537 

least great as a literary artist, 537 

is often obscure 538 

the arrangement of his mate- 
rial often perplexing 538 

Sordello often regarded as a 
mediaeval literary morass. . . 538 



594 



INDEX. 



Browning, Robert, his defense 
of his fragmentary method 
of communicating his facts, 538 

he makes his reader a judge, 
poet, creator, 539 

his method of telling his story 
illustrated in The Ring and 
the Boole, 539 

his obscurity becomes less 
troublesome and more at- 
tractive on familiarity 539 

there are passages which per- 
haps the poet cannot under- 
stand, 539 

his translation of Agamemnon 
facetiously said to be com- 
prehensible by reference to 
the original 539, 540 

exhibits occasional lack of judg- 
ment as to what is valuable 
and what merely curious,... 540 

influence of criticism of Caro- 
line Fox upon, 540 

is often defective in construct- 
ive power to make most of 
his matter 540 

examples of his obscure and of 
his easily intelligible verse, 540 

fails in rhythmical and musical 
expression 541 

Mrs. Browning superior to him 
in melodious composition, . . 541 

aims not to be an emotional 
poet, 541 

his brusque style accounted for, 541 

a poem illustrating his abrupt 
turns 541 

plays a sort of literary "Snap 
the Whip " with his readers, 
51, 542 

in him the philosopher over- 
tops the poet 542 

his material too much for him, 542 

gives us sometimes too little 
ortolan, 542 

cannot treat him with supercil- 
iousness 542 

his defects should not blind to 
his virtues, 543 

the fullest of learning and in- 
sight of the poets of the cen- 
tury 543 

Biichner, a mechanical philoso- 
pher, 31 

a modern Lucretius 39 

Buckland, Rabbi Joseph Wales, 
his parentage and early life, 
337, 338 

his name "Rabbi," why given 
and its influence 338 

his mother, 338 

his conversion 338 



Buckland, Rabbi Joseph Wales, 
enters Union College, New 

York 338 

his taste for natural science, 

338, 339 

Dr. W. R. William's influence 

upon him 339 

becomes pastor at Sing Sing, . . 339 
becomes member of Historical 

Society of New York 339 

becomes Professor of History 

at Rochester 339 

his professional life 339-342 

his death, 342 

his work not yet done, ...342, 343 
Buckle, Henry Thomas, his sta- 
tistical averages 23 

the materialistic spirit of his 

historical researches, 31 

Buddhism, its missionary char- 
acter accounted for 38R 

the nature of its morality 3«8 

Bunker Hill, Battle of. referred 

to 269 

Bunyan, his "man with the 

muck-rake " alluded to, ... . 8 
Burning of one's hand, facts 
physical and metaphysical in- 
volved in, 21 

Burke, his oratory characterized 

by Fox vii 

Bushnell, Horace, a progenitor 

of the New Theology, 165 

identifies divine righteousness 

and benevolence 165 

his theory of atonement con- 
tains a truth, 165 

Business, daily, a trusteeship for 

Christ 463 

Butler, Bishop Joseph, how he 
has contributed to our con- 
ception of the ethical nature 

of God, 5, 195 

did not sufficiently recognize di- 
vine immanence, 167 

Byron, Lord, a quotation from ap- 
plied to Positivist's uni- 
verse 13 

his genius 527 

Csesarea, its ruins, 477 

Caird, a Hegelian, 61 

Cairo 470, 471 

night entrance into 474 

Calderwood, denies the possibili- 
ty of an act of pure will. 

92, 122 

Call to ministry, its dignity, 270 

not universal 270, 271 

commoner than supposed 271 

its nature, 271. 272 

Calling, a useful, always respect- 
able 449 

Calvin and Augustine, their works 

compared 4 

Calvin, his assertion of free-will, 91 



INDEX. 



595 



Calvin, his theory of human lib- 
erty compared with that of 

Edwards 114 

on Adam's free-will 121 

asserted divine immanence, . . 167 

Calvinism, Modified 114-12S 

Campaniles, their erection and 

uses, 490 

Campbell's theory of Atonement, 21 G 
"Cannot" often equal to "will 

not," 124 

Capital, moneyed, of America, its 
ratio to the annual produc- 
tion, 447 

Capital, dreaded by laborer 452 

m;iy secure a tyrannical mo- 
nopoly of production 452 

wrong thinking about it even in 

America 452 

what it is 45:; 

deserves compensation 453 

its compulsory distribution a 

foolish scheme, 453 

must be consumed in paying 

wages 453 

must be renewed by labor 454 

not the natural end of labor, . . 454 

has duties 455 

its increase should not be 

dreaded 45G 

acquires dignity from its origin. 402 

acquires dignity from use, 4G2 

is a large set of tools 4G2 

a fund that employs labor. . . 4G2 

a friend of labor 462, 464 

to exist must be in constant 

circulation 462 

without it barbarism would su- 
pervene 462 

Capital and labor, relations be- 
tween, should be intelligently 

discussed 452 

are interdependent, 452 

should be no hostility between, 455 

both have duties 455 

cooperation of both, illustra- 
tions of 455 

their relations will yet be set- 
tled on a lasting basis 457 

Carlyle, Thomas, on Dante 523 

his portrait by Watts 525 

Carpenter, Dr., on one's existence 
being a matter of conscious- 
ness 50 

Cataclysms in geologic history, . . 141 
Cataract, parable of man afflict- 
ed with, 89 

Cato of Utica, his place in fu- 
ture world according to 

Dante 515 

Causal judgment, into what re- 
solved by Comte 11 

Causality, Hickok's illustration 

of 10 

Causation, necessary to law,.,.. 11 



Causation, if its intuition is dis- 
proved all other intuitions 

also perish 11 

origin of the idea of, 22 

not given by mere succession of 

events 22 

Cause, according to Comte, 10 

denned 33 

more than antecedence, 33 

an a priori truth, 4S 

of the universe, every religion 

demands personality in 53 

Causes final, secure confidence in 

the stability of nature 141 

account for needed deviations 

from usual order 141 

Causes, the various philosophical, 92 

efficient rest on final 141 

Cecil, on how to preach the whole 

truth 115 

Ceremonial privilege requires cer- 
emonial qualification 247 

Certainty of human actions de- 
termined by character 100 

Chalmers, Thomas, his scientific 
interest in Theology deepened 

into practical, 2 

on Political Economy as related 
to Moral Philosophy and The- 
ology 443 

his experience as a minister, 

550, 551 

Character, determines motive. ... 93 
the ground of divine foreknowl- 
edge. 100. 101 

permanence of, depends on will, 106 
and individual choices not nec- 
essarily connected 120 

does not absolutely bind 121 

defined, 157 

Charlemagne, his aim, 497, 49S 

"Chastisement in anger." why 

deprecated by Psalmist?.... 195 
Chastisement, not penalty, the 

experience of the Christian. 518 
Chemistry, present elements of. 
supposed to be modifications 
of one common ultimate sub- 
stance, 6 

Cheops, pyramid of, 472 

Cherubim, Natubb and Pub- 
pose op the, 391-399 

Cherubim, Edenic, a symbol of 

mercy 392 

various meanings assigned to, 391 

Milton's view of 392 

common impression regarding, 392 

etymology of title obscure 393 

references to in Scripture, .... 393 

occur in Ezekiel, 393 

occur in Revelation. 393 

are symbols of redeemed hu- 
manity 394 

are not personal existences, . . 394 



596 



INDEX. 



Cherubim, emblems of human 
nature possessed of its orig- 
inal perfections 395 

not symbols of nature 395 

emblems of human nature spir- 
itualized and sanctified 30G 

represent a humanity abounding 
in spiritual life 390. 397 

emblems of human nature as 
the dwelling-place of God. . . 397 

the Edenic. an assurance to the 
early races that Paradise was 
still held for man 39S 

the Edenic, an assurance that 
Paradise was only recover- 
able by a return to holiness 
and divine communion 39S 

the Edenic. a promise that Par- 
adise regained should be more 
glorious than E'aradise lost. 39S 

their varving relations, lessons 
from 398, 399 

not illustrations of our future 
bodies. . .• 399 

a revelation of spiritual quali- 
ties yet to be the possession 

of the redeemed, 399 

Chicago, a scene in, at opening of 

Civil War 199, 200 

Chivalry, a fruit of the Cru- 
sades, 498 

"Choice, power of contrary." 

phrase examined 97, 9S 

between motives, not without 

motives 122 

Choices and fundamental disposi- 
tion not necessarily connect- 
ed 120 

Christ, not admitted into Comte's 

pantheon 14 

his existence inexplicable on 
the evolution theory, 46 

the restorer of our prospects of 
endless development 162 

the extra-temporal, of New 
Theology 172-174 

the supra-historic, his influence 

on heathen, 1 76 j 

implicit faith in, its possibility. 177 , 

implicit rejection of, its possi- 
bility 177 | 

may be accepted or rejected 
without a knowledge of his 
historical manifestation 177 : 

union with 178 j 

Christ, The Two Natures of. 

201-212 j 

Christ, study of his person a 

science 201 j 

Son of man, 201 i 

Son of God 201 

a true man, 201 

docetic view unscriptural, 201 ! 

had a human body 201 

had a human mind 201 



Christ was subject to laws of 

human development 201 

tempted because of self-assumed 

limitations 201 

ignorant of the day of the end. 201 
in his twelfth year became con- 
scious of his mission 202, 226 

the ideal man 2o2 

hi> physical form 202, 203 

possessed orator's mien 203 

usually plain, but sometimes 

transfigured 203 

his temperament 203 

Chaucer's description of 203 

combined excellences of both 

sexes 204 

possessed excellences of great- 
est and best men 204 

a life-giving man 204 

not explicable by natural an- 
tecedents 2<">5 

no invention of men 205 

his humanity came from God. 2<'", 

his humanity germinal 2<»5 

conscious of divine Sonship. .. 2<>fi 

testimonies to his divinity 20G 

Christian consciousness attests 

his divinity 20K 

history attests his divinity 206 

his death has revolutionized 

history 207 

the centre of history 207 

modern world outgrowth of 
principles introduced by him. 207 

we need his divinity 208 

John of Damascus on his suffer- 
ings as related to his di- 
vinity 20',i 

because divine, suffered infi- 
nitely 209 

his humanity and deity for- 
ever united 209 

all that took place in him shall 

take place in us 209 

has our whole humanity In 

heaven, 209 

should be recognized in both 

natures 210 

Immediate recognition of him, 

its importance, 211 

the comforter in death 212 

his human nature purged of de- 
pravity in womb of Virgin. . . 214 
his relation to race more than 

federal headship, 215 

not merely constructive, but 

natural heir of race 21" 

the great Penitent 216 

may be banished to remotest 
room of believer's heart but 

cannot be expelled 222 

the first thirty years of his 
life 226, 227 



INDEX. 



597 



Christ understood, from begin- 
ning of his public ministry, 

its meaning and end 229 

the agent of the out-guiug ac- 
tivity of the Godhead 251 

geographical area of his person- 
al ministry 475 

advantages of our present doubt 
as to the places of the great 

events of his life 479 

to secure union with a living, 
personal, the aim of the 

Christian ministry 545 

presence of, in a minister, the 

source of healthful attraction, 545 
the perfect flower and embodi- 
ment of humanity 549, 551 

resurrection of, type of regen- 
eration, 55.3 

for three years a theological 

teacher, 553 

Christian Truth and its Keep- 
ers 2:JS-244 

Christianity threatened by Posi- 
tivism S 

the evidence that it is from 

God 129 

its internal characteristics as 

evidence, 129 

its external accompaniments as 

evidence, 129 

present tendency to lay special 

stress on internal evidence, . . 129 
its internal evidence supple- 
mentary, 129 

what its internal evidence must 

cover 129 

disadvantages of the method of 
individual internal certifica- 
tion of it, 130 

its internal and external evi- 
dences interwoven, 131 

supernatural facts its very core, 131 
miracles not its burden but sup- 
port, 132 

divinely radical, 374 

works from below upwards, . . . 374 
estimates "'service" by sac- 
rifice, 374 

missions a great argument for, 3SS 
a great argument for mis- 
sions 388, 389 

missions its distinctive mark, 3S8 
Christianity and Political 

Economy, 443-460 

Christianity, concrete as well as 

abstract 445 

is salvation for the body and 

society, 445 

accords with natural law 445 

Is a religion of nature, 445 

its accordance with laws of na- 
ture a proof of its divinity, 445 



Christianity, the great assistant 

of the Political Economist, 445 
has anticipated the discoveries 

of Political Economy 445 

asserts a natural inequality of 
gifts and stations among 

men, 446 

rejected by many working men 
because it opposes a false 

Social Science, 446 

hope of mankind 459 

and its resulting ameliorative 
sciences, connected as parent 
stem of banyan-tree with suc- 
ceeding stems 459, 460 

its social side, 401 

recognizes wealth 401 

not passivity 550 

Christlieb on reason, 419 

L'hristo Deo Omnipotenti, as a 

motto, 5S5 

" Christology" a modern coin- 
age 201 

Church, an organism 17S 

its organization not founded on 

human wisdom, 246 

is not germinal, 240 

does not rest on expediency,.. 246 

is of nermanent obligation 246 

its system of organization laid 

down in New Testament, . . 247 
its various parts alluded to in 

New Testament, 247 

polity, democratic form of, good 

for good people, 564 

Cicero on honestum and utile, ... 55 
Cities, tendency of population to, 461 
"'City which hath foundations" 

alone can satisfy 483 

Classification, fundamental idea 
of, found in unity of self-con- 
sciousness 9 

Coal, presence of coniferce in, il- 
lustration from 451 

Cognition, according to Spencer, 

recognition*, 49 

Cognitions, primitive, are verities, 21 
testified to by unintentional 
acknowledgments of their de- 

niers, 22 

Coleridge, influence of his writ- 
ing-; 5 

College and Seminary, how differ- 
entiated 284 

College, Christian, what? 320 

should have actively Christian 

leaders 320 

should give Christian instruc- 
tion 320 

its discipline should be Chris- 
tian 321 

its instruction should be per- 
vaded with a Christian spirit, 321 
should possess high moral 
standards, 321 



59S 



INDEX. 



College, should aim to make Its 

students Christians 321 

Colleges, Ouh, ake they Chris- 
tian V 319-323 

Colleges, the true denominational, 
were intended to be Chris- 
tian 320 

many have ceased to be Chris- 
tian 322 

Collocation, useful, present in uni- 
verse 82 

its existence assumed by Sci- 
ence, S2 

Comedy, The Divine 501-524 

some of its translators and in- 
terpreters, 501 

internal evidence of its date, . . 504 

its introduction 504, 515 

has, according to its author, 

four meanings 505 

its personal element 505, 506 

a mediaeval Pilgrim's Progress, 506 
unfolds the author's idea of 

God's relations to humanity, 506 
its interpretation according to 

Miss Rossetti 506 

has a political meaning, . .506, 507 
its spiritual meaning its most 

important, 507 

its influence on Italian religious 

thought 507 

its spiritual meaning unfolded, 

507, 508 

the first and greatest Christian 

poem 508 

its cosmology 508, 509 

title "Comedy," why given?.. 509 
has influenced the Italian lan- 
guage 509, 510 

its verse 510 

its description of the Ante-Hell 510 
its description of Hell proper, 

510-513 

its description of Limbo, ..510, 511 
its description of the various 
punishments assigned to de- 
linquents : 511-513 

its description of Dis 512 

its description of the Judecca, 512 
its description of Satan, ..512, 513 

the poem of conscience, 513 

contains apt lessons for the 

present times, 514 

its description of Purgatory, 

515-518 

Its Ante-Purgatory, 515, 516 

Purgatory proper 516-51S 

Mount of Penitence, 516, 517 

is the Christian doctrine of 

sanctification in verse, 517 

Its Paradise, '. 51 0-521 

Beatrice acts as guide. .. .517. 519 
the series of the Heavens, 51!*, 520 

its Priinum Mobile 520 

its "Rose of the Blessed,"... 520 
flescribes t lie poet's celestial 
love for the beatified Beatrice 520 



Comedy, the Divine, each of Its 
three divisions ends with the 

same word 521 

its intense realism, 523 

why an imperishable work of 

genius, 524 

Common-sense, Berkeley appeals 
to it for proof of existence of 

ego 59 

Berkeley appeals to it against 

substance, 59, 63 

Communion, Paedo-baptist de- 
prives Baptist of privilege of 

enjoying it with him, 249 

Communists of Paris, their theory 

as to rent and interest,.... 452 
Cointe, Auguste, coryphaeus of 

Nescience, 9 

his principal errorjs, 9 

his postulate that we know 
nothing but matter, exam- 
ined 9 

his scythe cuts off his own legs, 9 
brief review of his system, .... 9 
his classification masterly, .... 9 
his fundamental principles op- 
posed to sound psychology, . . 9 
his position on causation, . .10, 11 
has no place for Inductive 

Logic 11 

his analysis of causal judgment, 11 
confounds necessary with cus- 
tomary, 11 

in admitting tendency of things 
toward a true philosophy, ad- 
mits design, 12 

his view of Theology and Meta- 
physics, 13 

his new religion 13, 14, 77 

he denies law, in denying cause, 16 
his inconsistency as to con- 
sciousness, 22 

' Conceive,' of God, impossible ac- 
cording to Spencer 50 

the sense In which it is essen- 
tial to knowledge 50 

the sense in which it is an acci- 
dent of knowledge, 50 

Concupiscence, why excluded by 

Romanists from list of sins, 102 
Condillac, influence of his writ- 
ings 7 

Epicurean, 32 

owes his sensational philosophy 

to Locke, 7, 58 

Congratulations to various gradu- 
ating classes on finishing 
their theological education at 

Seminarv 5 41. .116. 548, 

552. 554, 557. 500. 502, 563, 
567, 569, 572, 575, 57S, 580, 583 
Conscience, its supremacy demon- 
strated by Butler 5 

what, according to Spencer,.. 55 
its true nature, 55 



INDEX. 



599 



Conscience, no tribe found desti- 
tute of 78 

an evidence for God, 84 

Consciousness, involves in one 

duality two different things, 6 
equally a source of knowledge 

with observation, 20 

Conite's appeal to 22 

is it a mode of force? 24 

never transformed into physical 

or nervous force 46 

Spencer upon 50 

of God, the idealistic formula 

criticized, 70 

in psychology, what? 171 

in theology, what? 171 

the "' ethico-religious," 171 

Christian, the doctrine of, de- 
fined and discussed 170-172 

Consciousness, self-, its witness to 
a permanent something un- 
derneath and presupposed by 

all ideas, 66 

Conservation of force, not highest 

law of science 26 

Constantine builds church of Holy 

Sepulchre 4S5 

Constantinople, repulse of Mos- 
lems from, 4S5 

its influence on Crusaders, .... 500 

Consumers, all are 464 

Consumption, its present rate, . . 464 

of luxuries, not wrong 464 

Conversion, a new choice of mo- 
tive 121 

God's work and man's work in, 128 
Convicted sinner, only finds peace 
when he sees reparation for 

sin in the atonement, 219 

Cook, Professor, on original con- 
stitution of chemical ele- 
ments 43 

Cooperation of divine and human 

in act of man 150 

Cooperation, an important factor 

in resistance to capital, . . . 456 
Cooperative establishments, in 

Paris, 455 

in England 455 

their strength and weakness, . . 455 

best form of 455, 456 

Corinthians, Second, 3 : 6 250 

5 : 23 explained 218 

Corinthian women, the perpetuity 

of the commands to, 402 

Cosmological argument for exist- 
ence of God, its exact scope, 81 
its difficulty in minor premise, 81 

Hume's objection to, 81 

its difficulty as to character of 

cause 81 

its value stated 81 

Cosmos, an idea impossible to Pos- 

itivist, 71 

Councils of Ordinaton : their 

Powers and Duties,. . .259 26S 



Councils of ordination, see Ordi- 
nation. 
Courage, Passive and Active, 

554-557 

Courage, its passive aspect, 

vnofjiovr), 555 

its active aspect, nappiqcrta, . . 555 
Covenanter, the Scotch, of sev- 
enteenth century compared 
with Anglican of same time, 117 

Cranmer, an example, 279 

Creatianism, nominalistic 165 

Creation, theory of, more credible 
than that of chance develop- 
ment 44 

absolute, idea of, found among 

Hebrews only 45, 81 

what, according to Idealism,.. 72 
imperfect, because anticipative 

of the fall Ill 

not a miracle, 132 

according to Jewish proverb, . . 395 
Creations, have taken place on our 

earth 141, 142 

'Creative first cause," man not, 123 

Cross, the, its meaning 5S2, 5S3 

Crossley adopts cooperative plan 455 
Crozer, his generosity referred to, 301 

Crusaders, their personnel, 488 

two classes of 492 

Crusades, The, 484-500 

Crusades, the, their moving prin- 
ciple 484 

their story in brief 487-4S9 

great leaders in 488 

their social causes, 4S9-491 

demonstrate power of an idea, 489 
Guizot's classification of their 

causes 489 

their moral causes 491, 492 

not owing to papal influence, . . 491 
not prompted solely by hatred 

of a false faith 491 

not to be explained by mere ha- 
tred of the Turk, 491, 492 

arose from an awakening of 

religious feeling 492 

not owing to the grant of Pap- 
al indulgences 492 

accompanied by an anticipation 

of Christ's coming, 493 

animated by idea of a world- 
wide church, 493 

Lecky's opinion of, 493 

Midland's opinion of, 493 

effects of 493 

secured a transient influence in 

the East 494 

gave foreign outlet to the bru- 
tal forces still inherent in 

feudalism 494, 495 

Gibbon's opinion of, 494 

strengthened barriers against 
Turkish encroachments 494 



600 



INDEX. 



Crusades, the, Freeman's opin- 
ion of 494 

consolidated states of Europe, . . 494 

Hume's opinion of, 494 

Miohaud's division of the pe- 
riod of, 495 

what advantage they brought to 

the Roman church 495 

developed the spirit of religious 

persecution, 495 

were disadvantageous in some 

respects to Roman church, . . 49C 
taught those who engaged in 

them independence, 496 

gave occasion for complaints 

against the popes . 496 

disseminated a knowledge of the 

eternal city 497 

were the initial period of the 

downfall of the papal power, 497 
their effects upon the state, 497-500 
their influence on feudalism, . . 498 

compacted the state 497 

favored the absorption of small 

fiefs into large, 498 

their influence best seen in 

France 498 

diffused the loyal and courteous 
characteristics of chivalrv 

498, 499 

opened up Intercourse among 

peoples of Europe 499 

their influence on Mediterra- 
nean capitals 499 

gave an impulse to intellect, . . 500 
stimulated the spirit of travel, 500 
prepared the way for the in- 
troduction of Greek litera- 
ture, 500 

Curse, the original, its allevia- 
tions 391 

Curses, divine, prophetic not ar- 
bitrary, 402 

D'Alembert, an Epicurean, 32 

Damascus, described 483 

Damascus, John of, an early 

theologian, 4 

his view of the relation of the 
natures in Christ's person, . . 209 
Dante and the Divine Comedy, 

501-524 

Dante Alighieri, his birth, 501 

the times of his early life, 501, 502 
his meeting with Beatrice, . . . 502 
her influence upon him, ...502, 503 

his temporary fall 502 

method of his restoration, 502, 503 

his Vita Nuova, 503 

his thorough preparation for 

writing the Comedy 503 

his remarkable natural and ac- 
quired endowments, 503 

becomes a chief magistrate of 
Florence, 503 



Dante Alighieri, banishes the 

factious nobles, 503 

is in turn fined and banished, 

503, 504 

his wanderings 504 

perhaps visited Oxford, Eng- 
land, 504 

an amnesty offered him and de- 
clined, 504 

his bearing under his adversi- 
ties 504 

becomes a Ghibelline, 504, 506 

his death, 504 

his idea of humanity and its 

twofold rule 506 

his De Monarchia, 506 

first great advocate of Italian 

unity, 506, 507 

first great advocate of inde- 
pendence of church and 

State, 506, 507 

distinguishes between the popes 

and the papacy 507 

a loyal Roman Catholic, 507 

abhorred the papal temporal 

power, 507 

denounces rulers of the church 

as Antichrist, 507 

an independent interpreter of 

Scripture, 507 

held the Ptolemaic theory of 

the universe 508 

his ideas of the earth, 508 

his ideas of Hell, 508 

his ideas of Purgatory, 508 

his nine Heavens, 508, 509 

his Empyrean, 509 

did not call his poem 'Divine,' 509 
why he called it "Comedy,".. 509 
his remarkable mastery of ver- 
sification, 509, 510 

his three great classes of sins, 

511, 512 

his theory of progress in evil. 512 
the philosophy underlying his 
classification and punish- 
ment of sins 511-515 

why he assigns grotesque pun- 
ishments to sin 513 

his description of Satan, con- 
trasted with that of Milton, 513 
teaches that sin is a self-per- 
version of the will 513, 514 

a lover of God and holiness, . . 514 
does not regard the essence of 
penalty as external to the 

sinner 514 

his material imagery symbol- 
ical 514 

he makes sin to be its own 
detector, judge, and tor- 
mentor 514 

the two sins of which he deems 

himself in need of purgation, 517 
regarded Purgatory as a proc- 
ess, 517, 518 



INDEX. 



601 



Dante Alighiori, his mistaken 

views regarding Purgatory, . . 518 

ignorant of justification by 
faith 51S 

his examination before enter- 
ing Primum Mobile, 520 

no rough, grotesque poet 521 

most sensitive to changeful as- 
pects of nature 521 

hail an enthusiasm for justice, 521 

how nicknamed by boys in 
street 521 

the most ethical of poets,.... 521 

his delight in light, as sym- 
bol of purity 522 

his abundant vocabulary to set 
forth various characteristics 
of light 522 

his vividness of description 

comes from experience 523 

Darwin, obliged to speak of 

'design,' 12 

saw no reason why the series 
of life on the earth should 
be toward higher rather than 
lower forms, 28 

his researches conducted in a 

materialistic spirit, 31 

David, an illustration of divine 

leading 5G0 

Davis, Noah, virtual founder of 
American Baptist Publica- 
tion Society 23S 

Dead Sea, description of 430 

Death, lessons learned in its im- 
mediate presence 1S8 

Degeneration, its occurrence apart 
from effort, the law of this 

sinful world 248 

Delphi, double legend upon the 

temple there interpreted 4 

Democritus, a materialist 32 

Denis. St., entry in the Chronicle 

of 500 

Der Einzige, an epithet applica- 
ble to every man 15G 

Design, marks of, according to 

Positivism, only coincidences, 11 

implied unintentionally in the 
language of the Comtists. ... 12 

the statement that it implies 
imperfection in God, ex- 
amined, 12 

imperfections of, do not prove 
absence of purpose in uni- 
verse, 12 

actual imperfections in. can 
be accounted for on grounds 
of moral government, 12 

seeming imperfections in, may 
arise from present ignorance, 12 

a voluntary self-limitation on 
the part of God, 12 

Maudsley on 12 

Spinoza's view of, 12 



Design, its perception, an a priori 

cognition, 48 

marks of, everywhere in uni- 
verse, 1S1 

Determinism, the theory of will 

so called 118 

opposed by- fact that man can 
choose a less degree of sin, 

118, 110 

opposed by fact that man can 
refuse to yield to certain 

temptations, 119 

opposed by fact that unconvert- 
ed man can give attention to 

divine truth, 119 

would remove guilt, remorse 

and punishment, 120 

advocated by Jonathan Ed- 
wards, 120 

Deus valt, the watchword of the 

first Crusade, 487 

Development, implied in Mosaic 

account of creation 45 

prospects of an endless, re- 
stored in Christ, 162 

a true kind of 559 

De Wette, with him scientific in- 
terest in religion became 

practical, 2 

D'Holbach. eighteenth century 

Epicurean 32 

a French Sensationalist 58 

Diaphane, an illustration from,.. 161 
Dictation-theory of Inspiration, 

see Inspiration. 
Diderot, a Sensationalist and 

Epicurean 32 

Dilemma, one suggested by Spen- 
cer's theory of primitive 

cognitions 49 

Diman. on combinations of law as 

agencies of ceaseless change, 25 
Dis, the city of, Dante's descrip- 
tion of, 512 

Disposition. Included in the larger 

view of will 94, 95 

involves moral judgments 94 

one may be imperfectly con- 
scious of, 95 

consistent with formal freedom, 95 
Dissecting-room, a juxtaposition 
of its disjecta membra does 
not make men, nor a mere 
accumulation of facts science, 10 
Divorce, why permitted to He- 
brews, 437 

Hebrew wife had no right of, 437 

Mosaic restraint upon 437 

in pagan Rome, 410, 411, 437 

Docetic views of Christ's person, 

unscriptural 201 

Docetic views of Inspiration,.... 153 

Dogmatism, Tbue, 557-560 

Dore. Gustave, his picture of the 

Deluge ■ 232 



602 



INDEX. 



Dorner, on man not being a mere 

tangent to God 150 

on docetic view of Inspiration, 153 
his Eschatology unsatisfactory, 17G 
'Doth he not leave the ninety and 

nine?' its interpretation,... 368 
Doubt, theological, see- Minister. 
Dragoman, his office and import- 
ance, 476 

Draper, his antagonism to meta- 
physics 8 

his statistical averages 23 

Dualism of consciousness, as in- 
explicable as that of sub- 
stance, . . . .• 70 

Duns Scotus, an early Nominalist, 104 
Dupont, shares profits with his 

employees 456 

Dwight, Timothy, his views of the 

nature of sin and virtue, . . ion 

Eagle, a symbol of character 39G 

its symbolism in Divine Come- 
dy, 520 

Earth, perhaps segregated from 
rest of universe because of 

sin, 304 

East, Recollections of the, 

46S-483 

Easter-torches, a lesson from 
method of lighting them at 

Jerusalem 257 

Economic Science, see Political 

Economy. 
Education, like water rather than 

vapor 318 

Education of a Woman 418-430 

Education, some results visible, 

others not 418 

its chief problem, a double one, 418 

what etymologic-ally, 418 

more than discipline, 418, 419 

imparts love and faculty for 

knowledge 419 

Is principally the impartation 

of truth 419 

the test of its success, 419 

"the higher," a new significa- 
tion given to epithet, 420 

requires close study, within a 

limited sphere 420 

an improved, requires a refor- 
mation commencing with ele- 
mentary training, 425 

of John Stuart Mill, 425 

of Niebuhr, 425 

at Quincy, Massachusetts, .... 420 
when active, begins with a boy, 427 

not scholarship, 428 

should elicit individuality 430 

Education, female, usually not 

exact 420 

mav it embrace Greek and Lat- 
in? 421 

should be broad 421 

should embrace all that enters 
into men's, 421 



Education, female, Ion mot re- 
garding, by English bishop, . . 422 
should include physical train- 
ing 422 

should include domestic econ- 
omy 422 

should develop symmetrically 

the whole being, 422 

effected largely by example, . . 422 
should impart a good manner, 422 

should not ignore Bible 423 

not essentially different from a 

man's 424 

emphasizes studios specially ap- 
propriate to the student 424 

should not be on principle of 

co-education 424 

time given to, at present too 

limited 427, 42S 

arrested by undue attention to 

trifles 42S, 429 

proceeds best in quiet, 429 

Educators, their work 418 

Edwards, Jonathan, Bancroft on 
his services to philosophy and 

religion, 5 

his estimate of philosophical 

studies 14 

a Berkeleian, 59 

based identity on decree of 

God 72 

his theory of will neglects some 

facts of the case, 114, 120 

on philosophical necessity 120 

through his identity-system 
Idealism has affected theol- 
ogy 107 

how he became an Idealist,.. 108 

no traducian 16 

his explanation of our union 

with Adam 10S 

denied substance, 108 

his theory of imputation 108 

was he a Placean? 108 

taught continuous creation... 1GS 
located responsibility not in 
sin as a nature but as an 

activity, 108 

on Justification 224 

did not wish statements of a 
material Hell and its physic- 
al torments to be understood 

literally 514 

Efficient cause, what? 92 

Ego, alone puts forth and is con- 
scious of force, 42 

Egypt, Recollections of 468—474 

Egypt, spring morning in 468 

its welcome to travelers 4GS 

the landscape in, 470, 471 

sunset and night in 474 

donkey-boys of 470, 473, 474 

ignorance of, in middle ages. 500 
Election, God's, founded on rea- 
sons existing in himself 108 



INDEX. 



603 



Elements, chemical, their adapta- 
tion to each other, 43 

Eliot, George, her writings gen- 
erally materialistic, 31 

on the reward of duty 1G1 

her moral indifferentism 531 

her exaggeration of heredity,. 533 
Emerson, on man as here, not to 

work, but be worked upon, 24 

his idea of the poet 525 

is better than his philosophy, 
when he teaches the re- 
sponse ' I can ' to duty's 

•Thou must,' 533 

Emerson, Dr. G. H., his state- 
ment as to foundation of doc- 
trine of probation after death, 127 
Emmons, on moral character of 
an action inhering not in its 
cause but in its nature,.... 117 
on impossibility of independent 

agency 1G0 

Empiricism. its influence on 

Priestley 7 

on other philosophers, 7, 8 

Empyrean in Dante's Paradise, 509 

'Ep ©eui, 553 

Encyclopaedists, their philosophy, 7, 32 
End in nature controls choice of 

means, 28 

Endosmosis, a certain, of Chris- 
tain influence 5G 

Enthusiasm, defined 553 

Epic poetry always individual in 

its subjects, 50G 

Epicureanism, a materialistic de- 
velopment in era of great 

deterioration, 32 

Epicurus, his philosophy antag- 
onized by that of Aristotle 

and Plato, 15 

Erasmus, his policy, 278 

Errors, how serviceable 1G 

Eternity of matter, if accepted, 
leads toward atheistic evo- 
lution 57 

Ethics, what, according to Spen- 
cer 55 

Eugenie, Empress, anecdote of, 465 
Europe in thirteenth century 501, 502 
Evangelization of heathen must 

begin in the family life. . . 416 
Evolution, if proved, merely a 

mode of divine action 2S 

Evolution, The Philosophy 

of 39-57 

Evolution, the present philoso- 
phical fashion, 39 

succeeds Positivism, 39 

avails itself of spoils of pre- 
ceding systems 40 

Is powerfully advocated 40 

violates the spirit of the Ba- 
conian philosophy, 40 



Evolution, rests rhysical truth 

on a priori reasoning 41 

assumes as postulate an imper- 
fect definition of force, .... 41 

excludes will 42 

teaches that matter, mind and 

motion come from force, ..43, 44 
fails in its explanation of life, 

45, 46 

to some extent recognized by 

believers in revelation, 45 

fails to account for mind 46 

fails to account for soul, 46 

fails to account for Christ,. ... 46 
fails to explain a priori knowl- 
edges, 48-30 

shuts out knowledge of God. 50-53 
its explanation of feeling of 

moral obligation, 53 

teaches that action is right be- 
cause useful, 54 

teaches that conscience is the 
mind's power of comparing 

utilities 55 

a fascinating system of mon- 
ism 55 

is destructive of morality, . . 56 
its influence already felt in 

art and literature, 56 

Evolution in the history of a 

redeemed soul, 161. 162 

Ex nihilo omnia fiunt, a suggest- 
ed axiom for Comte, 10 

Exchange, a central doctrine of 

Political Economy 450 

admits the principle of mutual 

advantage, 450 

Exodus, 15 : 11 188 

Exegesis, New Testament, should 

be thorough, 325 

should be broad, 325, 326 

English, its stages 326 

should be bold 326, 327. 328 

should be reverent, 328, 329 

Exercise-system. originates in 

teaching of Edwards 16S 

its nature explained, 169 

tends to Pantheism, 169 

makes supernatural religion 

impossible, 169 

destroys sense of sin, 169 

impugns the divine character, 169 
Existence of God, see God. 
Experience, requires a prior 

mental potency, 9 

is but "the stern-lights of a 

ship," 140 

warrants merely an expecta- 
tion, 140 

according to Huxley never war- 
rants ' must,' 140 

of the truth, not the limit of 
the preacher's proclamation, 172 
Faith, fundamental to philoso- 
phy, 21 



604 



INDEX. 



Faith in our mental powers, a 

part of our nature, 21 

all science in its last analysis 

rests on, 21 

a higher, may be dormant in 
the soul awaiting divine 

vivification, 21 

denned 88 

a kind of knowledge, 99 

Faith, Thr Measuke of Suc- 
cess 572-575 

Fall, see Adam. 

Falsehood, every, has a grain of 

verity 32 

Fanaticism, its nature 584 

Fatalism, refuted by knock-down 

argument, 21 

its rejection does not require 
acceptance of caprice-theory 

of will, 99 

a false Calvinism merges in,.. 118 
Fatimite Caliphs, their cruelties 

to Christian pilgrims 480 

Faucet, an unturned, illustration 

from 257 

Fechner, his "psychology with- 
out a soul," 69 

' Fetish, Great,' suggested title 
for earth in the Comtian 

cult, 13 

Feudalism, its nature, 490 

influence of Crusades on, 498 

Feuerbach, his mechanical phi- 
losophy, 31 

his maxim, ' man is what he 

eats,' 37 

Fichte, his ' we are all born in 

faith,' 21 

reduces all knowledge to knowl- 
edge of self, 60 

merges the Absolute in the 

Ego, 00 

his illustration of the un- 
changeableness of natural se- 
quences, 134, 135 

Fijians, matricide among 411 

Final cause, its principle — work 

toward ends — in ourselves, . . 20 
science dependent on principle 

of 26 

H. B. Smith's illustration of,. 92 
Final causes merged by Positiv- 
ists in totality of secondary 
or efficient causes, .. .11, 12, 20 
Finality, immanent, or uncon- 
scious intelligence 26 

has secured acceptance by 

many scientists 20 

illustrated by instinct of bee, 26 
illustrated by unconscious for- 
mation of language 26 

illustrated by spontaneity of 

genius, 26 

a theory which loses sight of 
man, 27 



Finney, Charles G., In Rochester, 

N. Y 387 

Foraminifera, illustration from,. 244 
Force, an alleged ultimate, of 
which perceived forces are 

modifications 6 

its idea from our consciousness 
of power present in every 

act of will 25 

not a property of matter 33 

as observed in arrangements of 

universe must be mental, . . 33 
must be postulated as behind 

and previous to all things, 41 
an inseparable correlate of ef- 
fort and will, 41-43 

conviction of its existence 
' ' deep as very nature of 

mind," 41 

put forth by the ego or mind, 42 
the process by which, accord- 
ing to Spencer, it becomes 

' forces,' unexplained 42, 43 

alone cannot explain motion, . . 44 
according to old and new ma- 
terialism 59 

Fox, C. J., on Burke's style of 

oratory vii 

France, the greatest problem of 

reconstruction there, 452 

Francesca da Rimini, how Dante 

treats the story 513 

Franchise, not necessary append- 
age of mere humanity 407 

Fraud, its future punishment ac- 
cording to Dante 512 

Free agency, defined, 221 

Freedom, human, irreconcilable 

with divine sovereignty 6 

according to determinism, 90, 118 
according to caprice-theory, . . 90 
best method of investigating. .90, 91 
Remainders of, in Man, . .114-128 
theories of Augustine. Calvin, 

aud Edwards regarding 114 

normal, what? 114 

and divine sovereignty, how 
treated by Robertson and 

Cecil 115, 116 

and divine sovereignty. Paul's 
sublime acceptance of both, 

115. 116 

must not be exclusive datum of 

a system of doctrine 116 

according to Fatalism 118 

Freedom in unregenerate. to 
choose a less degree of sin 

rather than a greater, 119 

to refuse to yield to certain 

temptations 110 

to do outwardly good acts 119 

to seek God from self-interest. 119 
to give attention to abstract 

truth from love of it 119 

to give attention to God's 

claims 119 

involves responsibility 120 



INDEX. 



605 



Free will, what? 55 

destroyed by Spencer's philoso- 
phy 55 

can add to original sin, 121 

French, excel in literary style,.. 538 

Frescoes at Pompeii 56 

Fundamental disposition of char- 
acter cannot be self-changed, 119 
Furies, Greek, punish offenses 
though unwittingly commit- 
ted, 120 

Gallus, Caius Sulpicius, his di- 
vorce of his wife 410 

Garbett, Bampton lecturer, on 

contending for the faith 558 

Gardner on mind giving matter 

its chief meaning, 30 

Garfield, President, Sermon 
preached on his death. 

347-357 

Garfield, President, should re- 
member his character, . .347, 348 
an example of the American 

type of man 348 

his varied career 348, 340 

drifts into preaching 348 

advocates sound currency 348 

his public and private virtues, 349 
his undue concessions to the 

pressure of party 354 

Garfield's death, attended by al- 
leviating circumstances, .... 349 

a permissive providence 349 

an answer to prayer, 349, 350 

a source of blessing to the na- 
tion, 350 

an education in patriotism 350 

a quickening of world-wide 

sympathy 350 

not a fruit of conspiracy 351 

should lead to more prayer for 

our governors 351 

should secure a penitent consid- 
eration of the national sin 
which was its indirect cause, 

351, 352 

a time for public utterances, 354 
Its lesson to each citizen, .... 357 
' Gender, soul has none,' the 

statement examined, 404 

Genesis, 2:18; 3 : 24 400 

Geology, as earth's autobiogra- 
phy, contains no account of 

its birth, 45 

Gerbert, an early preacher of 

Crusades 486 

Gerizim, ascent of, 482 

Germany, progress of Baptist 

principles in 243 

Giants, the primeval, their pun- 
ishment in Hell according to 

Dante 512 

Gladiatorial shows at Rome, out- 
come of a false philosophy, 56 



God, interpreted by mind 3 

according to Maudsley, a mere 
Brahma 12 

limited by nothing outside of 
himself, 12 

self-limited 12, 51, 75, 76 

we have an intuitive knowledge 
of his existence, 16 

intuitive knowledge of, blunted 
by sin 16 

intuition of, brightened by the 
coming of Christ 17 

his presence in nature, a source 
of comfort, 29 

is master of nature 29 

can all that he will, but wills 
not all that he can 43 

immanent in universe yet 
transcendent 46 

usually works by natural laws, 46 

may work by direct exercise of 
will 46 

his existence an a priori truth, 48 

in what sense cognized by hu- 
man mind, 50 

can know him without a mental 
image of him 51 

in what sense infinite, 51, 76 

in what sense absolute, ... .51, 75 

we know him in relation 52 

Spencer practically confesses to 
a knowledge of, 52 

according to Berkeley may di- 
rectly cause sensations 58 

his existence not defensible by 
Idealist, 69 

according to Idealism, is a se- 
ries of ideas, 70 

can do more than create ideas, 71 

may give relative independency 
to portions of physical force, 71 

knowledge of, its conditions, 71, 89 

the term defined 75 

duty of those destitute of af- 
fectional conditions for 
knowledge of 89 

the direct author of sin in 
the heart. according to 
scheme of Hopkins and Em- 
mons, 117 

influence of Nominalism on 
conceptions of his nature and 
attributes, 164 

as "the simply One," un- 
knowable 165 

idea of, lost with that of sub- 
stance, • 166 

immanence of, unduly promi- 
nent in New Theology, 167 

as described in one hundred and 
fourth Psalm, 181 

his relation to Cosmos as set 
forth by Paul 1 81 

not an unintelligent, uncon- 
scious principle 181 



606 



INDEX. 



God, as tlie author of man, must 

himself think and will, LSI 

a personal Being in the high- 
est sense 1 82 

possesses a will of infinite 

freedom and power 182 

is sufficient to himself, .. .182, 1S3 
his eternal independence and 
self-sufficiency rest on the 
Trinity in his nature, .. 183, 191 
not compelled to create,.... 183 
present in all ' ' laws of na- 
ture," 1S4 

above all "laws of nature,".. 1S5 
nature to him as "a loose 

mantle," 185 

offended as a living person by 

sin 185 

reconciled himself by Atone- 
ment, 186 

personally interested in Crea- 
tion, Providence and Re- 
demption 186 

his will and heart seen in In- 
carnation and Atonement, . . 1S7 
his attributes, their nature, . . 189 

self -preserving, 191 

his working in a soul in no 
sense suspends its activities, 550 
God, existence of, not demon- 
strable by argument, 80 

proposed arguments for, four, 81-85 
Cosmological argument for, .... 81 
Teleological argument for, ..S2, 83 
Moral or Anthropological ar- 
gument for 83, 84 

Ontological argument for S4 

defects in all arguments for, 84, 85 
presupposed in all logical 

processes, S5 

an intuitive knowledge, S6 

his leadings in Providence, 560, 561 
his leadings by the Spirit. .561, 562 
God, Holiness of, its first men- 
tion in Bible 1SS 

perfect 190 

proceeds from his very being, . . 190 

is sublimely energetic 190 

asserts itself, 190, 191 

is a positive thing, 191 

not a mere antithesis to evil, 191 

its relation to his justice, 191 

its relation to law 192 

finds expression in his anger, 192 

its relation to benevolence 193 

not utilitarian 194 

is not love to universe, 194 

Is not a means to an end, 194 

co-existent with his love 195 

his primary and fundamental 

attribute, 195, 196 

light thrown upon its place in 
divine character by man's 

moral constitution 195, 196 

Is reason for punishment of 
persistently sinful, 197 



God, Holiness of, and his love, 

reconciled in Atonement, . . . . 191 
its majesty set forth in life 

and death of Christ, 198 

enhances his love to sinners, 198 
sight of, preliminary often to 

a sight of the divine love. . . 199 
the practical effects of the 

study of 199 

God, idea of, may be described 
as characterizing human na- 
ture, 76 

its prevalence among mankind. 

76-79 

present when not formally as- 
serted 77 

present though rudimentary,.. 77 
men in mass have entertained, 77 
testimonies to the generality 

of, 78 

implicit existence of, how at- 
tested 78 

developed on suitable occasion 

being given 78, 79 

how accounted for 79-87 

not from external revelation, 79 
presupposed in either true or 

false religions, 79 

not from sense-perception or 

reflection 79, 80 

not from consciousness 80 

not from conscious process of 

reasoning 80 

intuitive 86 

God, intuitive knowledge of, 

dimmed by sin 86 

influence of argument on, .... 87 

helped by revelation 87 

assumed by Scripture ST 

Spencer denies that it is ade- 
quate to purposes of science, 87 
not an accretion of past expe- 
riences, S7 

not present with brutes, 87 

infinite, and cannot therefore 
arise from any combination 

of fiuites 87 

as valid as any belief in the 
Unknowable or in the Per- 
sistence of Force, 87 

is a faith, and yet is founda- 
tion of a science, 88 

God, justice of, is transitive holi- 
ness 191 

requires creation for its exist- 
ence, 192 

the publication and enforcement 

of his nature, 192 

reveals law 192 

is legislative holiness, 192 

is executive holiness 192 

the detecter and punishcr of 

moral evil 192 

consistent with compassion, ... lit » 

is not capricious 193 

invariable 195, 196 



INDEX. 



God, The Living 180-1S7 

' God, the living,' a common des- 
ignation in Scripture, 180 

the promulgation of its idea, 

the duty of the Hebrews, . . ISO 
implies an all-originating and 

all-sustaining life in God, . . 180 
implies that God has a life of 
the Spirit, conscious, intel- 
ligent and self-determining, . . 180 
a conception of, delivers from 
the tyranny of the modern 

idea of law, 183 

a conception of, gives new viv- 
idness and reality to God's 
dealings with our individual 

souls, 1S5 

brightest revelation of, in the 

incarnation 187 

God, love of, what it is, 103 

cannot be resolved into holiness, 

193, 194 

chooses its objects, 195 

the ground of his chastisements, 195 
not the ground of punishment, 195 

co-exists with holiness, 195 

is optional 196 

conditioned by holiness 196 

absent from the inflictions of 

the future 197 

and his holiness, reconciled in 

Atonement, 197 

best understood in light of his 

holiness, 198 

' God's Providence our Inherit- 
ance,* 561 

Good deeds, after doer's death 

rise to heaven 330 

live on earth 330 

Gottesbewusstsein, 80 

Graduation, feelings suitable to 

the occasion of 544 

Gravitation, its nature unknown, 33 
a uniform and conscious expres- 
sion of mind and will, 42 

Greek Exegesis, A Great 

Teacher op, 330-336 

Greek literature, its introduction 

into Europe, 500 

Green, a Hegelian 61 

Gregory of Nyssa, opposes pil- 
grimages, 485 

Growth into moral goodness im- 
possible in fallen man, .... 112 
Guibert, Abbot, on the Crusades, 492 

Guizot, on Providence 390 

on causes of Crusades 489, 490 

Gunsaulus, Transfiguration of 

Christ, quoted 74 

Gustavus Adolphus, his public 

vow, 228 

Guy of Lusignan. his career 490 

Gymnasium a useful appendage to 

a Theological Seminary, 307 

Gymnasia, German, have an ele- 
mentary theological course, . . 321 



Gymnasia, German, Bible closely 

studied in 42H 

Habit, what ? 575 

how cultivated 577 

Habits In The Ministry, . .575-578 
Hackett, Professor Horatio 
B., Address at his Funer- 
al, 330-336 

Hackett, Professor Horatio B., 
on increase of educated min- 
isters about Boston 301 

caught his exegetical enthusi- 
asm from Stuart of Andover, 331 

became a Baptist, 331 

the Nestor of Greek exegesis in 
Baptist denomination, 331 

his influence not confined to 
Baptists, 332 

his characteristics as a teach- 
er 332-335 

revisits Germany 335 

his sudden death 335 

wide-spread regret at 336 

his death alluded to 554 

Hadrian, his demolition of Jeru- 
salem 484 

Hale, Sir Matthew, his belief in 

witches, 147 

Hall, Robert, loses his material- 
istic views at the grave of 

his father 37 

Hamilton. Sir William, on no dif- 
ficulty emerging in theology 
which has not emerged in 
philosophy 14 

the injurious consequences of 
his doctrine of the relativity 
of knowledge, 16 

relegates idea of divine exist- 
ence to realm of faith 16, 88 

his teachings opened up way to 
Idealism 16 

sought to remedy defects of 
Reid 61 

showed absurdity of representa- 
tive perception 62 

admitted a vitiating ideal ele- 
ment into our knowledge of 
an external object 62 

failed to explain why non-ego 
must be extended, 62 

the limits of his Natural Real- 
ism, 62 

his concessions to Idealism, . . 62 

his classification of Idealists. .62, 63 

his treatment of Objective 
Idealism, 63 

his reply to T. Collyns Simon, 64 

grants too much to Berkeley, 64 

on logical absurdity of demon- 
strating the absolute from 
the relative 84, 85 

his view of will 123 

Haroun al Raschid, his generosi- 
ty 48a 



608 



INDEX. 



Harris, a Hegelian 61 

Hartley, his theory of vibrations, 7 
Uartmann, a contributor to our 
knowledge of the facts of 

man's nature 97 

Harvard, feelings in its Memorial 

Hall, 277 

its legend . ". 285 

Hazard on foreknowledge not es- 
sential to supreme governing 

power of universe 100 

Heathen, our impression of their 
guilt weakened by New The- 
ology 176 

can claim nothing from God... 170 

are guilty 170 

have a manifestation of Christ 

in this life 173 

have a universal sense of sin. . . 170 
Christ is doing supra-historic 

work among them 176 

may have an implicit faith in 

Christ 177 

may implicitly reject him 177 

Heathen lands, Christ yearns 
over, more than over Chris- 
tian, 369 

Heaven, its rewards 160, 1G1 

a realm of crowned heads, ... 162 
a plaoe of historic retrospect, 365 
Heavens, the nine of Dante. 508, 509 
Hebrews, their purpose in his- 
tory 180 

Hebrews 2: 11, ('of one"), ex- 
plained 209 

Hegel developed the subjective 
tendencies of Kant's phi- 
losophy, 8 

the influence of his transcen- 
dental Idealism 31 

his explanation of the develop- 
ment of the One into the 

Many 60 

makes the rational the real. 00 
his system opposed by the fact 
that personal wills war 

against the rational 60 

with him "thinking thinks." 

01, 70, 160 

his teachings, a counter-weight 

to agnostic materialism 61 

has found able advocates 61 

his teachings end by opposing 

facts of history and morality, 61 
regards God as universal, im- 
personal intelligence and 

will 167 

his view of the soul 1G7 

on Christianity ' seeking the 
living among the dead.'.... 484 
Hegelian revival, these are davs 

of 533 

Helena, and the Holy Places of 

the East 455 

Hell, according to Dante 508 



Hill, inscription over its gate... .".10 
sign of God's estimate of sin. 514 
its fire and brimstone, of wliat 

symbolical 514 

many men already there in this 

life 514 

ascent from, to Purgatory, how 
accomplished 515 

Hell-gate rock, illustration from 

its removal 380 

"' Help-meet " explained 400 

Henry Fourth at Canossa 487 

Heredity, confirmatory of Scrip- 
ture doctrine of unity of 
race 105 

Hickok's illustration of the princi- 
ple of causality, 10 

Higginson's question, "Ought 
women to learn the alpha- 
bet? " 421 

High-Mindedness 580-5S3 

Hildebrand, his character, 486 

his failure to originate a Cru- 
sade, 4SG 

History, on Spencer's principles, 

a fatalistic development 55 

History. Church, and one who 

taught it 337-343 

Historv. mediaeval, its cardinal 

point 497 

Historv. and natural history, re- 
lated 339 

Hohenstaufen, house of, its ef- 
forts 497 

Holbach. D\ J. Baron, a French 

sensationalist philosopher. . . 58 

Holiness of God, The 1SS-200 

Holiness, a reward of heaven... 161 

what? 1S9 

onlv approximate among men, 

1S9, 190 

binding on men apart from re- 
sults, 194 

its supremacy will be acknowl- 
edged bv an assembled uni- 
verse 200 

Holland, its pile-supported cities, 

illustration from, 3 

Holmes on man 13 

Holy-places, their true place in 

religion 484 

Holyoake's description of the re- 
sults of Positivism 13 

Homiletics, a part of Theological 

Seminary training 304 

Honrstum, Cicero on 55 

Hooker, on Inspiration, 148 

Hopkins, on the moral quality of 
an action being only in its 

nature, 117 

on God as the cause of every 
event 160 

Horse-back riding in Palestine,.. 475 



INDEX. 



609 



Hotchkiss, Rev'd V. R., D. D., 
a teacher of Bible in the 
original languages at Roch- 
ester Theological Seminary, 34-4 
an ardent lover and student of 

the Bible, 344 

his general Information, 346 

peculiarities of his instruction, 346 

love of Bible-lands 346 

Howe, John, on inscription on 

Temple at Delphi, 4 

Hughes, Archbishop, on the im- 
pressibility of early life,.. 416 
' Humanity collective,' an object 
of worship in Comte's new 

religion, 13 

Hume, David, makes a further 
application of Berkeley's 

principle, 59, 166 

Sydney Smith's witticism upon, 59 
his exclamation to Ferguson,.. 78 
urges that he never saw a 

world made, 81 

stigmatizes miracle as a vio- 
lation or suspension of natu- 
ral law 133 

his argument against miracles 

a petititio principii, 143, 144 

Humility, Augustine on, 582 

Humists, what the soul is to 

them, 50 

some modern 59 

Hunt on matricide among Fijians, 

411, 412 

Hunt, Holman, his "Shadow of 

the Cross " referred to, . . . 202 
"Husband of one wife," its 

meaning, 441 

Husbandmen, excluded from Pla- 
to's ideal government, 447 

Huxley, Thomas, the subservi- 
ence of some divines to him, 9 
his researches conducted in a 

materialistic spirit 31 

declares spontaneous action an 

absurdity 30, 37 

his definition of matter 59 

on the absurdity of wasting 

time on "lunar politics,".. 75 
on substituting the "must" of 
necessity for the "will" of 

law, 140 

Hypocrisy, its future punishment 

according to Dante, 512 

Ice-floe, illustration from an inci- 
dent upon, 256 

Idea, in nature, what? 34 

as regarded by absolute Ideal- 
ist, 62 

in non-egoistical Idealism, ... 62 
does not guarantee actual exist- 
ence, 84 

according to Hegel, 97 



Ideal, an, its advantage to the 

young, 19 

Ideas, in nature, solely product of 

mind, 33 

according to Berkeley 63 

according to modern Idealism.. 65 
distinct from cognition of them, 65 
and things, distinct from each 
other according to common- 
sense 66 

Idealism, declares matter spirit, 6 
its consummation, pantheism, 8 

Idealism, Modern 58-74 

Idealism, its teaching 58 

originates with Locke 58 

as taught by Hume, 59 

as taught by Humists 59 

its mischievous effects 59 

Kant's reaction against 59, 60 

Fichte's modification of 60 

of Hegel, extreme 60, 61 

of Hegel, its influence 61 

Hamilton's concessions to, . . . 62 -64 
Hamilton's classification of, . . 62 
Idealism, modern, how held by 

Lotze, 63 

Berkeley's varying views of, . . 63 
reasons for its prevalence, . . 64, 65 
the objective form of, freest 

from objection 65, 66 

objective form of, compared 

with natural realism, 66 

assumes that mind can know 

only ideas, 66 

inconsistent with itself, 66 

must grant existence of self be- 
fore cognition of ideas, ..66, 67 
cannot consistently maintain 
that the object perceived is 
different from the act of per- 
ception, 67 

Professor Knight on, 67 

ignores difference between body 

and idea of body, 67 

confounds outness with dis- 
tance 67, 68 

finds in self the ground of unity 

for mental phenomena, 68 

should find in material sub- 
stance ground of unity for 

material phenomena, 68 

confounds conditions of external 
knowledge with objects of 

knowledge 68, 69 

each advocate of, must con- 
sistently deny existence of 
any other save himself, .... 69 
takes refuge in consciousness of 

God 69, 70 

view of God, according to, ... . 70 

is monistic 70 

denies that mind can know mat- 
ter 70, 71 



INDEX. 



Idealism, modern, its Influence 

on Ot. istian faith 71-74 

destroys distinction between 

possible and actual, 71, 72 

destroys distinction between 

truth and error, 72 

should logically declare that 
God is the only cause in the 

realm of spirit, 72, 73 

strikes at the roots of morality, 7.'? 

leads to solipsism 73 

as injurious as materialism, 73, 74 

why opposed by Hamilton 73 

best remedy for 74 

its advocates, 1G6 

its nature 166 

teaches an exaggerated indi- 
vidualism, 166 

commencing in particulars ends 

by giving up individuality, . . 167 
adopted by many modern theo- 
logians, 167 

Identity, absolute, the system of, 
declares matter and spirit 
forms of one underlying sub- 
stance 6 

Identity, based by Jonathan Ed- 
wards on the absolute decree 

of God 71 

system of Edwards and the New 

Theology 167 

Idolatry, what ? 484 

Image, mental, not necessary to 

knowledge 50 

Imagination, what? 527 

alone, will not make a poet, . . . 531 
shares in man's eternal pro- 
gress, 543 

Impressions, mental, require thing 
impressed and thing which 

impresses, 43 

Incontinence, sins of, according to 

Dante, 511 

Inconceivability, to make it a 

test of knowledge, erroneous, 51 
Indestructibility of matter, a rela- 
tive not an absolute truth, . . 44 
Individualism, Christian, . . 156-163 
Individuality, typified by nature, 156 

in men's bodies and souls 156 

illustrates God's freedom,.... 156 
implies that each is guilty of 

men's, inferences from 157-163 

peculiar sins, ^,. . 157 

of sin, renders it a peculiar in- 
sult to God and influence for 

evil 157 

of sin, requires a peculiar ac- 
count to God 157 

of sin, renders each ''the din- 
ner" and "chief of sinners," 158 
of man, requires the adaptation 
of peculiar wisdom and grace 
to save him, 158 



Individuality of man, requires a 
personal election ami call.... 158 

requires an intercession on be- 
half of each '. . . 158 

requires personal leadings of 
Providence 159 

requires special discipline 159 

involves a special experience, . 159 

implies a peculiar work to do 
for God, 159, 160 

involves a peculiar reward, . . 160 

raised in heaven to its inteusest 
power 161 

should be characteristic of min- 
ister 555 

Induction, Dr. Porter on 85 

Dr. Peabody on 85 

warrants only an expectation, . . 140 

rests ultimately on fact of uni- 
versal design, 140, 141 

Inertia, a property of matter, . . 33 

means that matter is not self- 
moving 44 

Infinite, because undefined, said 

to be unknowable, 51 

God is, as being the ground of 

the finite 51, 76 

Inspiration, Its Method, .. .148-155 
Inspiration, differences of opinion 

as to method of, 148 

the dictation theory of, accord- 
ing to Hooker 148 

involves instances of direct dic- 
tation 148 

a manifestly human element in, 148 

Quenstedt's view of, 148 

dictation-theory of, will not 
cover all the facts, 149 

dictation-theory, passage al- 
leged in its favor, examined, 149 

dictation-theory of, contradicts 
the usual method of God's 
working in the soul 149 

is a union of the human and the 
divine, 150, 153 

is more than mere "general in- 
structions," 150, 151 

the help of God granted in 161 

something like the afflatus ex- 
perienced by divinely helped 
preacher, 151, 152 

theorists upon, affected by their 
views of the miraculous, .... 152 

in, God speaks through not to 
man 153 

more than illumination, 153 

God in, can transcend the pow- 
ers of man's mental and 
moral nature, 153 

do*etic view of inspiration, .... 153 

its products attract by their hu- 
manness 15:! 

permits every imperfection in 
its products not Inconsistent 
with truth 153 



INDEX. 



611 



Inspiration, how knowledge is 

communicated therein 153 

defined 153 

does not require the communi- 
cation of words, 154 

In what sense it extends to all 

Scripture loo 

are there degrees of? 155 

Browning's teachings on 535 

'Instruments in the hands of 

God,' the statement guarded, 550 
Intellectual nature, disproves ma- 
terialism, 35 

Intellectual Philosophy, its re- 
sults as real as those of 

physical observation 20 

Intellectual pursuits, their advan- 
tages, 563 

Intelligence, theory of an uncon- 
scious, in nature, stated and 

refuted, 26, 27, B3 

Intelligences, myriads engaged in 

divine messages to this earth, 364 
Interpretation, New Testa- 
ment, 324-329 

Interpretation. Biblical, its status 
at end of second quarter of 

the century, 331 

fourfold, according to Dante, . . 505 
Intuition. Schelling*s theory of 

direct 60 

its relation to truth, 171 

Intuitions, primitive, called into 
consciousness by outward in- 
fluences 21 

cannot be got rid of 22 

what according to Spencer, .... 50 

Kant's view of, 60 

more than regulative, 00 

Irving. Edward, his error 215 

Isaiah's vision, its bearing on 

missions, 3S0 

Isocrates' encomium on Heraclei- 

tus applied to Browning . . . 542 
Italian cities in the middle ages, 499 

Jackals in Palestine, 477 

Jaffa visited, 477 

James, Henry, his novels charac- 
terized, 561 

Janet, on will setting in motion a 
series of events which could 
not have occurred without Its 

interposition, 24 

Jeremiah, 10 : 10, ISO 

Jericho, its ruins . . 477 

Jerome opposes pilgrimages, .... 4S5 

Jerusalem, its appearance 478 

Jesus, Society of, as example, 367 
Jevons, on author of Baconian 

philosophy, 40 

Jocularity not incompatible with 

seriousness 536 

John of Damascus, an early theo- 
logian, 4 

John, 21 : 21, 22, l."6 



John the Baptist, his mission, ... 227 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, of Yale, 
his influence on Jonathan 
Edwards, 168 

Jones, Sir William, on 'What 

c/nstitiites a State?" 447 

Joppa visited 477 

Jordan, the vailed character of 

its course 470 

Josephus, description of Christ in 

his works interpolated 203 

Joy, a reward of Heaven 161 

Jude, 3, expounded, 558 

Judea, Wilderness of, its descrip- 
tion 479 

Judecca, the lowest Hell according 

to Dante, 512, 513 

Judgment, the final, John Nel- 
son's dream of 529 

Kaffirs, Koussa, state of women 

among 411 

Kant, outcome of his philosophy, 8 
his idea of our conception of 

God 16 

his revolt against idealistic 

skepticism 59. 61 

showed that sense perceptions 

involve a priori conceptions, 60 
failed to see that the testimony 
to the noumena is as valid as 

that to the phenomena 60 

only claimed for intuitions a 
subjective or regulative exist- 
ence, 60 

his refutation of the ontological 
argument for the existence of 

God, 84 

maintained that things conform 
to cognition not cognition to 

things, 84 

on women's carrying learning 
for show as they carry use- 
less watches 422 

Kaulbach's picture in the Royal 

Museum, Berlin, referred to, 17 

Kemble, Mrs., her impulse when 

before an audience, 429 

Kentucky, underground rivers of, 
types of human impulses be- 
low consciousness, 96 

'Kept,' its double meaning in 

Genesis 3 : 24, 393 

Khayyam. Omar, his fatalistic 

teaching, 533 

Kindergarten, its success 425 

Kingdom of God and its Com- 
ing, 358-367 

Kingdom of God, Christ its King, 358 
world-kingdoms are imperfect 

types of, 353 

the only truly universal mon- 
archy, 359 

how prophesied 359 

set up in soul, 360 

its pledge of naturalization, the 
Holy Spirit , 360 



612 



INDEX. 



Kingdom of God, typified by di- 
vine rule in nature 300 

is of grace and not of force, . . 361 
an actual union with the life 

of God in Christ, 362 

is one 362 

its erection the great end of 
God's economy of redemption, 363 

is not of this earth alone 363 

once established is never des- 
troyed 364 

its almost incredible greatness, 305 

it shall come 305 

agencies through which It 

comes 305 

demands the best energies of 

every young man 366 

its majesty furnishes an incite- 
ment to labor, 366 

it shall be a blessed place to the 

true laborer 367 

to foes a falling stone grinding 

to powder, 367 

King's Chamber in Great Pyra- 
mid 473 

Kingsley, Charles, on ancient 

tragedy, 533 

Kinship with the sinning a ground 

of sympathetic suffering, . . . 217 
* Know ' explained as ' limit ' 

or ' define,' 51 

Knowledge rests on more than 

facts 10 

Spencer's theory of 47 

according to Spencer, trans- 
formed sensations 50 

its sources according to Locke, 58 
involves more than is conveyed 

by sensation 68 

does not require identity be- 
tween knower and thing 

known, 70 

how much a man may lawfully 

acquire, 463 

Knowledge, relativity of, 47 

term borrowed from Mansel and 

Hamilton 47 

a watchword of Spencer's phil- 
osophy, 47 

puts into our knowledge a vi- 
tiating subjective element, . . 47 
a reprehensible mystification of 

truth, 48 

Knox, encomium upon, 557, 280 

Krauth on Idealism, 71 

Krupp, adopted co-operative sys- 
tem at Essen, 456 

Labor, its advantages to a sinful 

race 391 

its place in Political Economy, 446 

chief origin of wealth 440 

Hobbes on 446 

Adam Smith on, 446 

division of, its advantages 448 



Labor, productive and unpro- 
ductive, 449 

its value rests on mental and 

moral qualities entering into, 449 
its value ascertained by regard- 
ing it as "service," 449 

is likely to have a larger share 
of profits than previously,.. 455 
Landor, Walter Savage, on 

Browning, 585 

Language, formation of, an in- 
stance of unconscious intel- 
ligence, 20 

Laplace, his scheme of universe, 44 
Law, fixed and not phenomenal, . . 10 

produces phenomena, 10 

involves causation 11 

essential to logic, 11 

natural, God's ordinary channel 

of working, 46 

imperceptible to the senses,... 48 
new conception of, confirmatory 

of Scripture-realism, 165 

perfection of divine 176 

as related to God, 184 

tyranny of modern idea of , . . . 184 
not an exhaustive expression of 

divine will 185 

God's, a transcript of his being, 192 

holiness in requirement 192 

divine and human, not co-or- 
dinate 245, 246 

Laws of nature, what? 184 

how man uses them 184, 185 

Laying-on of hands in Ordination, 

conveys no new grace, 265 

symbolic of public side of ordi- 
nation 265 

conveys authority, 2G5 

Leadership, Training fob, 314-318 

Leaders, church must have, 314 

Leadership desirable in the 

church 314 

training for needed 315 

requires confidence in the truth, 317 

Leadings, God's 500-502 

Learning, according to Lord Ba- 
con 463 

Leaving the Ninety and Nine. 

368-377 

Lecky's philosophy, its results,.. 58 
Loclaire, his conduct as employer, 455 
Leibnitz, his nisi intcllectus,. . . . 5S 
Leighton, Archbishop, on the min- 
istry 299 

Lessing, on a revelation revealing 

nothing 129 

Lewes, his antagonism to meta- 
physics, 8 

his idea of philosophy 49 

Leyden jar, brain resembles 552 

Licensure, what? 260 

Life, superior to mechanical and 

chemical forces 34 

its relation to protoplasm, .... 34 



INDEX. 



613 



Life, reveals Idea both in animal 

and plant, 3-1 

originates from preceding life 35 
not the result but cause of or- 
ganization 3d 

its origin from inorganic ele- 
ments, an unscientific as- 
sumption, 35 

comes from an immaterial 

source 35 

a reward of heaven, l'6l 

present, finality of its decisions, 177 
human, modern idea of its sac- 
redness 207 

' Like people, like priest,' good 

sense of adage, 557 

Limitation, self-divine, involved 

in God's perfection, 75 

greatest proof of will and 

power 18G 

shown in person of Christ,... 1SG 
Lion-like features of character, 

what? 39G 

Lives, human, according to Pan- 
theism 8 

4 Living creatures,' term applied 

to cherubim 39G 

' Living Temple,' Howe's alluded 

to 4 

Locke, his influence 5, 7 

derives our knowledge from sen- 
sation 58 

his notion of reflection, 58 

not always consistent, 58 

his dictum 58 

opened the way to French sen- 
sationalism, 58 

influence of his teaching on mor- 
als 58 

influence of his teaching on 

religion, 58 

influence on Berkeley, 58 

Kant's criticism on his system, 60 

on Inspiration, 155 

influence on modern Idealism, 166 
Logic, an overweening, at war 
with the existing qualities of 

nature 6 

requires recognition of law,.. 11 
Lombards and Pope Alexander III, 499 

Lotze, his Idealism G2 

Ix)ve defined 193 

"Love and Death," a painting 

by Watts 525 

"Love and Life," a painting 

by Watts 525 

Lucretius revived in modern ma- 
terialists, 39 

the influence of his teachings, 56 

Luke 24 : 26 213 

Luther, his mistake in not found- 
ing Theological Seminaries, 300 
Luxuries, required by high men- 
tal development, 464 



Luxuries, consumption of, how 

far right for Christian, 464, 461 
Luxury, must not waste money in, 465 

a temperate, what? 465 

must be consistent with love of 

God and man, 465 

must not be permitted to hard- 
en heart 46G 

must not make this life the 

chief object 4GG 

must be means to a higher end, 4GG 
must not interfere with claims 

of religion 466 

indulgence in, a question of per- 
sonal conscience, 466, 407 

Lyall, William, on will, 123 

Lyell, Sir Charles, on geology as 

earth's autobiography 45 

M. C. B., the legend on the Mac- 

cabean standard 367 

Madonna della Seggiola of Ra- 
phael, described, 41 3 

Maker, in what sense man is, . . 527 
Malice, its punishment according 

to Dante 512 

Man ist teas er isztj 37 

drop of water which chooses 

reflect heaven and earth, . . S 
each, born an Aristotelian or 

Platonist, 23 

a microcosm 24 

conquers nature, 24 

is what he eats, says Feuer- 

bach 37 

cannot be evolved from mere 

brute, 46 

drop of water which chooses 
whether it will fall into the 

Rhine or Rhone, 123 

the power which gave him be- 
ing must think and will. . . 181 
never absolutely holy in this 

world, 189, 190 

his duty to himself 190, 191 

the intelligence and voice of na- 
ture 395 

before Fall, perhaps the climax 

of creaturely perfection, .... 395 
ennobled by the possession of 
the qualities typified by the 

cherubim 395, 396 

how related to Pope and Em- 
peror according to Dante. . . 50G 
Mandeville, Sir John, his travels, 500 
Manhood, dignity of, taught by 

Christianity, 447 

taught by Political Economy, . . 447 

not an intuitive idea 447 

denied by greatest masters of 

ancient thought 447 

Its development the aim of so- 
cial science 448 

prohibits that man be used,. . 44S 
Manhood in the Ministry,. .548-557 
Mansel, his treatment of reli- 
gious faith unsatisfactory, ... 1€ 



614 



INDEX. 



Mansel, his suggested practical 
answer to Fichte's illustra- 
tion of the unchangeableness 

of natural sequences, 135 

Maories, fate of a wise man 

among 318 

Mar Saba, ascent to, 480 

Marheinecke, on the improbabil- 
ity of women becoming too 

learned 430 

Marriage, covenant of, in Eden.. . 400 

what it is 406 

age for, discussed 428 

unlawful in one State may be 

lawful in another 431 

valid though both parties go 
into another State to evade 

laws of their own, 430 

by a person divorced in N. Y. 
State, valid in that State, if 
legally consummated in an- 
other, 434 

to deceased wife's sister, though 
legally consummated in Den- 
mark, held invalid in Eng- 
land 434 

law of domicile applies to, ac- 
cording to Lord Chancellor 

Campbell, 434 

Judges Westbrook and Story 
would apply law of domicile to 434 
of a person in N. Y. State not 
dissolved by a divorce issued 

In Ohio 435 

should be equally with divorce 

under law of domicile 435 

Bishop denies that law of domi- 
cile applies to, 430 

"wretched condition of law re- 
garding," 437 

law of Scripture regarding, 437—440 
sanctity of, among Hebrews, . . 437 
formalities prescribed by Mo- 
saic law before its dissolu- 
tion, their beneficent intent, 437 
Christ's exposition of its origi- 
nal law 438 

some modification of Christ's 
teaching by St. Paul, asserted 

and denied, 43S 

not a mere civil contract 442 

an ordinance of God 442 

is the mutual merging In one 
another of the personal liber- 
ties of the contractors, .... 442 

not a mere partnership, 442 

not a sacrament, 442 

yet it is sacred 442 

law regulating, a part of inter- 
national law, 433 

lias legal ubiquity of operation, 433 
its validity to be decided by law 
of place where celebrated, . . 433 



Marriage, may be declared null 
and void In certain cases. 
wherever celebrated, by ex- 
press declaration of statute, 433 
though illegal if contracted 
within N. Y. State, yet if 
contracted without the State 
is not illegal, because of ab- 
sence from Statutes of ex- 
press clause declaring such 

marriage null and void 43'! 

the state of law in U. S. A. 

concerning 484 

Brook vs. Brook 4.'! 1 

Cropsey vs. Ogden 43." 

Erkenbrach vs. Erkenbrach. ; . . 437 

Kerrison vs. Kcrrison 415 1 

Marshall vs. Marshall, 432, 435, 434 

O'Dea vs. O'Dea 4::T 

People vs. Baker 435 

People vs. Hovey, 4:><; 

Ponsford vs. Johnson, 4:54 

Thorp vs. Thorp, 43G 

Van Voorhis vs. Brintnall 436 

Martineau, James, on philosophers 

braining themselves 

on statistical averages, 24 

on ' the ought to be othei than 

what is,' 37 

Martvr, Justin, on the youth of 

Christ, 202 

Massey, Gerald, the poet of labor, 

quoted on its anticipations, 457 
Mastery of self, its nature, ad- 
vantages and conditions, 563-5Gfi 

Material cause, what? 92 

Materialism, its vicious efforts, 

after monism 6, 7 

the drift of unbelief in the pres- 
ent day 31 

colors science, literature, educa- 
tion, philanthropy and theol- 
ogy of the time 31 

must be met and neutralized by 

Christianity 31 

what? 31, 32 

propounded by Democritus and 

Epicurus 32 

rises in periods of national and 

social declension 32 

contains a small amount of 

truth, 32 

a protest against Idealism, .... 32 
ignores anything above or be- 
hind the existence and work- 
ing of material elements, .... 32 
its refutation from three dif- 
ferent sources 32-38 

furnishes no proper cause for 

the universe 33 

its doctrine that force is a prop- 
erty of matter untenable, .... 33 
cannot explain the force sub- 
jected to idea present in the 
universe 33, 34 



615 



Materialism, cannot explain the 

phenomena of life 34 

disproved by facts of our being, 35 

cannot educe intellect from 
matter 35 

cannot reduce to physical meas- 
urements thought or feeling, 35 

regards mind as a tablet on 
which sensations make their 
mark 35 

cannot make thought a link 
in any series of material 
phenomena 35 

in its suggested explanation of 
mind contradicts facts of 
consciousness, 30 

destroys free will, 36 

its determinism 36 

its outcome rigidly necessi- 
tarian 36, 37 

annihilates conscience, 37 

how Martineau came to revolt 
against it 37 

gives up immortality of soul, 37 

logically, it is Atheism, .. .37, 38 

disproved by facts of our re- 
ligious nature, 38 

in what it originates 38 

refuted by a sense of sin in 
the soul, 3S 

cannot explain the person of 
Christ 38 

impossible to the Berkeleian, 58 

monistic in its scheme of the 
universe 70 

an argumentum ad ignoran- 

tiam, 

Materialistic Skepticism, . . 31- 
Mathematical truth, merely phe- 
nomenal, according to Pos- 
itivism, 

Matter, interpreted by mind, .... 

and spirit, neither can be ig- 
nored 

in the act of knowing it, what 
other acts involved 

what, according to Positivism, 

not a sufficient cause for uni- 
verse, 

in its last analysis, what?.. 

Boscovitch's idea of, 

if force, purely subjective, . . 

known with the same certainty 
we know our existence 

not developed from loose forces 
in an empty void 

indestructibility of, no a 
priori truth, 

its inertia, 

its motion inexplicable without 
adjustment, 44 

external. Berkeley declined to 
postulate as cause of sensa- 
tions, 5,S 

definition of. by Mill 59 

definition of, by Huxley, 50 



70 | 
38 



Matter, supposition of its exist- 
ence, contrary to common- 
sense according to Berkeley, 59 
according to prevailing philos- 
ophy, ' only definable in 

terms of sensation,' 64 

only has meaning in connection 

with miud 65 

its eternity held by most ante- 
Christian and many mod- 
ern philosophers 81 

Maudsley, on design implying im- 
perfection in God 12 

Maxwell, Professor Clerk, on 
atoms as ' manufactured ar- 
ticles,' 44 

McCosh, James, his scheme of 
philosophy midway between 
Nescient and Omniscient 

schemes 15 

Medicine, students of, in danger 
of passing over spiritual 

facts, 19 

Mechanical philosophy, the pres- 
ent vogue, 31 

employment destructive of vir- 
tue according to Aristotle, . . 417 

Memphis visited, 470, 475 

Mental energy, not a physical 

force, 35 

not measured by physical 

tests 35 

Mental facts, demonstrable, 20 

Mercantile theory, of Political 
Economy, its teachings and 

effects 449 

Metaphysical inquiry equally val- 
id with physical 20 

Metaphysics, denied by philos- 
ophy of Nescience, 8 

and theology, both declared by 
Comte a relic of the infancy 

of the race 13 

a science of 20 

at basis of all other science, 

20, 21 

many terms of science have 

their meaning from, 21, 22 

unconsciously admitted by de- 

niers 22 

Metellus, Censor, his opinion of 

women 410, 411 

Middle Ages, great idea of, ... . 492 
MiJii Vivere Christus, a motto, . . 585 
Mill, John Stuart, his erudition 

and acumen 8 

his inconsistency in use of 

word ' cause.' 22 

his opinion of validity of math- 
ematical axioms, 49 

a Humist, 50 

his definition of matter 59 

his definition of mind, no 

his object of worship, 77 

his argument from seeming 
imperfections in nature, .... 83 



616 



INDEX. 



Mill, John Stuart, on 'Subjection 

of Women/ 403 

his portrait, 525 

his idea of God in relation to 

universe, 542 

Milton, John, his influence on 

English religious thought, . . 507 
Miud, not a modification effected 
in brain of a common ulti- 
mate physical force 6 

what, according to philosophy 

of Nescience, 8 

as open to investigation as mat- 
ter, 9 

what, according to Positivism, 11 
in nature, as plain to observer 
as intelligence in other men 

is plain to him 27 

presents the truest image of 

God 28 

active in its knowing 35 

connected with but not identic- 
al with matter, 35 

its testimony to its own na- 
ture 30 

cannot be got from matter, . . 46 

not a tabula rasa at start 48 

its a priori cognitions 48 

defined by Mill, 59 

defined by Berkeley, 59 

not an idea 66 

not a succession of feelings, . . 66 

Minister, its meaning 250, 449 

Christian, regard bestowed on 
his person in early New Eng- 
land days, 285 

his office now too generally 
regarded as a mere profes- 
sion, 286 

should have a conviction that 

he is called of God, 286 

characteristics prominent in 

his youth, 545 

his true influence arises from 

presence of Christ within, . . 545 
the advantages which flow from 
his possession of the self- 
sacrificing spirit of Christ, . . 548 

his two great principles 518 

must be a true man, 54S, 551 

his manhood to be sought in 

Christ 549 

what he is not 549 

should seek after a self-de- 
termined activity of all his 

powers 550 

should be a man of one pur- 
pose 551 

his pulpit should be the focus 
of a world-wide whispering- 
gallery 551 

should preach as possessing 

' one only life,' 551, 559 

dependent on God for power, 552 
obtains spiritual influence by 
submission to the laws of its 
enmmunication 553 



Minister, should be an agent 

rather than an instrument, 553 

not a hand, but a power-ma- 
chine, 553 

an arrow in the hand of the 
Almighty 553 

should have enthusiasm 553 

should be a man of much pray- 
er 553 

needs passive courage 555 

needs especially active courage, 555 

should possess intelligent inde- 
pendence, 555 

should be fearlessly frank of 
speech 555 

influenced by the national spir- 
it, 555 

should impress by earnestness 
of physical energy 556 

should not be impeded by tra- 
ditional rules, 55G 

should cultivate practical force, 
555, 55G 

should have a better motto 
than 'hold the fort,' 556 

should seek to fulfill in a sense 
' like people like priest,'.... 557 

his prerogative, great boldness, 557 

his courage should come from 
Christ as the heart of his 
life 557 

must oppose to the skeptical 
dogmatism of the times the 
dogmatism of faith 557 

should have a definite body of 
truth by which he can stand, 55S 

should have confidence and zeal 
in the propagation of the 
truth 558, 559 

in what sense should preach 
development 559 

how he should preach the gos- 
pel, 559 

enjoys the leadings of God, . . . 560 

the subject of God's Provi- 
dential leadings, 561 

the subject of the Spirit's lead- 
ings 561, 562 

must master himself if he 
would master others 563 

must master his besetting sins, 563 

must master his intellectual 
powers, 563 

must submit to actual circum- 
stances 563 

must avoid denunciation,.... 564 

must not despair 564 

must bide his time, 561 

is weakened by consciousness 
of secret sins, 564, 565 

should exemplify the divine 

law 56,1 

should manifest the presence 
with him of a personal 
Christ 505 



INDEX. 



Minister, his true self must put 

down his false 563 

is a shepherd 5G7 

should be open-minded to re- 
ceive and to communicate 
truth 5G7 

should avoid subterfuge 567 

should be hopeful and trust- 
ful 5G7, 508 

should be sympathetic, 5G8 

should not regard audience ' as 
rows of cabbage.' 570 

Should recognize his hearers' 
needs 570 

should adapt himself as Christ 
adapted himself to circum- 
stances 570. 371 

should be master of spiritual 
diagnosis 571 

advantages which become his 
from adaptation in his 
preaching 571. 572 

should regard Bible as final 
standard of appeal 572 

his vocation sublime 574 

should study daily original 
Scriptures 575 

should cultivate the homiletic 
habit 576 

should cultivate the demonstra- 
tive habit 576 

should maintain a believing 
habit 576, 577 

how he may cultivate right 
habits 577 

himself, more than his preach- 
ing, an influence 577 

will have doubts 578 

his doubts do not affect the 
truth of the general Chris- 
tian scheme 578 

must not put too much stress 
on his doubts, 579 

must not preach his doubts, . . 579 

though doubting, must work 
and pray 579 

must cherish a proper high- 
mindedness 5S1 

must avoid an improper high- 
mindedness, 581, 582 

should seek humility by con- 
templating the cross, 583 

should have zeal 584 

should avoid fanaticism 584 

his zeal should possess passion- 
ate devotion 584, 585 

acquires zeal by taking Christ 
into heart 585 

should receive Christ for per- 
sonal holiness and external 

influence 585 

Ministers. Christian, present de- 
mand for 299, 300 

trustees of "the faith once de- 
livered to the saints," 558 



Ministry. Claims op Christian, 
on Young Men in Courses 
of Preparatory Study, 2G9-280 
Ministry, Christian, falling off of 

students for, 179 

oneness of race, an argument 
for entering 179 

importance of guarding en- 
trance to 250 

set up by God 270 

the highest human vocation, 
270, 574 

call to enter it, more common 
than generally supposed,.... 271 

the nature of the call to 271 

duty of seeking out candidates 
for 272 

thorough preparation for, requi- 
site 272 

has its infelicities, 272, 273 

compares favorably with other 
professions 273 

has an attractive start 273 

has an assured social position, 273 

helps to a symmetrical man- 
hood, 273-275 

the agency of greatest useful- 
ness to mankind, 275, 276 

requires self-sacrifice, 276 

its claim for service rests on 
sin and sorrow of world, . . 277 

proffers immortal honors, 278 

Ministry, sources of supply 

for 2S1-2SS 

Ministry, decrease of trained men 

entering it 281-287 

statistics showing fact 281, 2S2 

not counterbalanced by increase 
of ability among the dimin- 
ished candidates, 282 

decrease of trained men enter- 
ing, occurs in spite of a 
wide-spread demand for able 
men 2S3 

may be explained by the pre- 
vailing philosophy of the 
time 283 

may be explained by the rush 
for material riches, ... .283. 2S5 

may be explained by the secu- 
larizing of our colleges, .284. 2S5 

may arise from a change of 
view as to the divine nature 
of the ministry 285 

may be remedied by ministers 
making their calling at- 
tractive 2S6 

may be remedied by ministers 
walking worthy of their vo- 
cation 287 

may be remedied by laymen in- 
ducing suitable young men to „ 
enter it 287, 2SS 

may be remedied by a provi- 
sion for proper training for 
the work 288 



618 



INDEX. 



Ministry, may be remedied by af- 
fording student suitable help 
during his time of study,.. 2SS 

shduld be made a matter of 

prayer, 2S8 

Ministry, Lack op Students 

FOB, 289-293 

statistics showing number of 
men in, to churches 2S9 

statistics showing number of 
untrained men in 2S9 

statistics showing falling off in 
students for, 2S9 

men of culture and promise 
ceasing to enter 289, 290 

strong churches ought to fur- 
nish men for, 290 

Christians have been indiffer- 
ent to its supply, 291 

parents are not anxious that 
their children should enter, . 291 

should draw its men from the 
best families, 292 

if more reverenced, its ranks 

would be fuller 292, 293 

Ministry, Education for: its 

PlIINCIPLES AND ITS NECES- 

SIT y j 294-391 

a divine appointment, 294, 295 

requires a special education, . . 295 
Christian, and Mosaic priest- 
hood distinguished 295 

must be abreast of life 296 

of a past generation, ineffect- 
ive now, 296 

requires education because of 
skeptical tendencies of the 

day, 29fi 

requires special discipline be- 
cause of intensity of modern 

life • • • 297 

requires special training be- 
cause the age one of organiza- 
tion, 298 

requires its members to be con- 
secrated and ardent students 

of truth, 298, 299 

training for it should be sup- 
plied by our churches 299 

parents no longer anxious that 
their children should enter, . . 299 

its dignity, 299 

Archbishop Leighton on 299 

according to George Herbert, . . 299 
Baptist, specially requires 
knowledge of original Scrip- 
tures, 300 

Ministry, Education for, its 

Idea and its Requisites, 302-313 
requires special educational in- 
stitutions, 303 

not numbers, but quality waut- 

ed, 309, 544 

dearth of candidates for, ex- 
plained 319, 320 



Ministry, Education for, rule of 
admission to, narrower than 
that of church -membership, 440 
special qualifications required 

for 440 

candidates for, must be 

' blameless,' 440 

a man is disqualified for, whose 
earlier sin shows traces in 

his present conduct, 441 

a man is disqualified for, who 
has defied, ' the powers that 

be,' 441 

'good report' necessary to,.. 441 
candidate for, must be, if hus- 
band at all, husband of one 

wife 441 

its ' three onlies,' 545, 546 

the word of God, its only 

weapon, 545 

its true success, 545 

faith in Christ, its energy, . . 546 

aided by Holy Spirit, 540 

manhood a condition of success 

in, 548 

must have power, 552 

enthusiasm needed in, 553 

a prophetic office 553 

for the period, spirit suitable 

to 559 

meets a crying want of hu- 
manity, 5G7 

Minnesingers, their rise 500 

Miracles, not impossible or im- 
probable, 19 

Miracles, The Christian, . .129-147 
Miracles, as attesting a Di- 
vine Revelation, 129-147 

Miracles, Christian, furnish prin- 
cipal evidence for Christian- 
ity 129 

the external certification which 

they furnish evidential 130 

must be defended as being in 
the very substance of Scrip- 
ture, 131 

cannot be sundered from the 

internal evidences 131 

prove doctrine and doctrine 

miracles, 131 

not a burden, but a support, 132 

why so generally ignored 132 

defined 132, 133 

not described in Scripture as 
violations or suspensions of 

natural law, 133 

do not necessarily suspend or 

violate natural law 134 

may be instances in which low- 
er laws and forces in nature 
are transcended and merged 

in higher ones, 134 

are possible if God be possible, 1.50 
(In they require immediate vo- 
litions of God at time of 
their occurrence 136 13? 






INDEX. 



619 



Miracles, 'providential,' what? 

1.36. 137 

Christian. Babbage'a theory of, 137 

provided for in the original 
plan of nature, 137, 13S 

' unusual, while natural law is 
habitual, divine action.'... 13S 

results of immediate divine op- 
eration, reason for preferring 
to regard them as 138, 139 

recurrence of, unproved 139 

if fully known to us we could 
not explain them, 110 

are they probable? 140, 143 

presumption against them on 
account of general uniformi- 
ty of nature 140 

uniformity of nature does not 
render them impossible, 140, 141 

principle of final cause will 
account for them, 141 

shown to be not impossihle by 
occurrence of geologic cat- 
aclysms, 141 

probable, because physical un- 
iverse exists for moral ends, 142 

probable, because an exigency 
worthy of such an interpo- 
sition has occurred, ...142, 143 

are they supported by sufficient 
evidence ? 143, 144 

the petitio principii in Hume's 
argument, 143, 144 

can be matter of testimony like 
other facts, 144 

their central one, the resurrec- 
tion of Christ, considered in 
detail, 144, 145 

ceased probably with first cen- 
tury. 145 

ceased with completion of can- 
on 146 

how distinguished from false, 146 

the only miracles that ration- 
ally justify credence, 147 

civilization has not destroyed 

belief in them 147 

Missionaries, should respect the 
independence of native 

churches, 3S1 

are evangelists from home- 
churches, 3S2 

should inculcate on native 
churches duty of self-sup- 
port and self -propagation, . 3S2 

should have a double faith,... 382 

should develop native agency. 3S3 

the character of the men who 
should he, 3S3 

should serve apprenticeship,.. 3S4 

should be brought home fre- 
quently 3S4 

should have interviews with 
home Committee 384 

should be amenable to disci- 
pline at hand of executive, 384 
Jesus Christ, the greatest of, . . 388 



Missions, rest upon a conviction 
of the oneness of the race. 
179, 373 

are paralyzed hy the teaching 
of a future larger opportun- 
ity for the heathen 179 

must follow lines of secular 
effort, 370 

rest on a self -imparting love, 371 

commenced among a lapsed 
Semitic race 372 

of apostles, did not overlook 
out-of-the-way places 372 

to barbarous Britons, 372 

re-creative in their influence, 372 

a century, a brief time to test 
them, 373 

a universal devotion to, would 
hasten millennium, 375, 376 

their present danger not en- 
thusiasm, but self-indul- 
gence 375 

safety of church lies in, 375 

Missions, Economics of, . . .378-3S0 
Missions, seventy years of Ameri- 
can Baptist, 378 

economics of, 378 

should be established among de- 
graded and weak tribes 378 

to Burmans and Karens con- 
trasted, 379 

must not overlook intellectual 
and refined peoples, 379 

should have persistent rein- 
forcement, 379 

must be an exhibition of Chris- 
tian life 379 

find a help in lack of individu- 
ality among heathen 379 

evangelization the principal 
branch of, 3S0 

medical, not much needed 380 

education need not precede, . . 380 

their converts should be gath- 
ered into churches without 
delay, 3S1 

their churches, character of, . . 381 

must not develop into episco- 
pacy, 381 

their converts not to be kept 
in perpetual tutelage, 382 

their slow progress in France 
explained 382 

importance of visiting-deputa- 
tions to their various fields, 385 

separate fields should be as- 
signed to individual churches, 385 

are the greatest argument for 
Christianity, 3S8 

are the distinctive mark of 
Christianity, 3SS 

the record of, has enlarged the 
conception of humanity, .... 388 

show what Christianity really 
is, 388, 389 



620 



INDEX. 



Mis-ions, based upon four funda- 
mental doctrines 389 

Christianity is an argument 

for 389 

love for, connected with love 

to Christ 3S9 

our attitude to. a test of char- 
acter 3S9 

Missions. modern theory of, 
founds itself on laws of civ- 
ilization and progress 309 

pays little attention to com- 
mands and promises of Scrip- 
ture, 309 

would confine its efforts to 
the intelligent and advanc- 
ing races 309 

adduces apostolic missions as 
planted mostly in centres of 

influence, 309 

would confine missions to 
America since best races 

represented here 370 

an element of truth in 370 

wrong, because it would not 
preach gospel to every crea- 
ture 371 

violates that instinct of Chris- 
tian love which stoops to the 

weakest, 371 

is opposed to the method which 
has been historically success- 
ful, 372 

ignores the solidarity of the 

race 372 

contemns the elevating grace 

of self-abandonment 374 

contravenes the plan that gives 

most glory to Christ 375 

deserts the example of our 

Savior, 376 

hesitates to cast itself abso- 
lutely upon the divine pow- 
er and promise, 376 

Missions, Theology op 387-390 

Moffat, Robert, his mistake as to 
atheism of certain African 

tribes 7S 

Mohammedanism, to an extent a 

missionary religion, 3SS 

its moral teaching 3S8 

Money, not. of itself, root of ev- 
ery evil, 401 

Monism, in every form, fatal to 

theology 7 

is either Materialism or Pan- 
theism 7 

false in every form 24 ! 

adopted by Spencer 47 

Its fascination for philosophic 

mind 55 

Mont Blanc, illustration from, . . 5 
Moody. D. L.. an example of con- 
secration, 565 1 



Mount of Penitence, its discipline 

of souls 516, 517 

Moral argument for existence of 
God, see Anthropological.. 
Moral inquiry as valid as physic- 
al research 20 

Moral feelings affirm not advan- 
tage but obligation 53 

ideas latent in mind of a child. 77 
obligation, according to Spen- 
cer founded in utility or hap- 
piness, 54 

quality of an action, in what 
it resides, according to Hop- 
kins and Emmons 117 

Moral truth, as ' positive ' as 

physical 20 

demonstrable by its own evi- 
dence, 20 

has its place in every system 

of thought 22 

Morality. Christian, its rules co- 
incident with those of util- 
ity, 4--.1 

Morals and science, complemen- 
tary, 20 

Mosaic cosmogony, evolutionary. 45 

Motion of matter, its source 33 

what' implied in its existence, 44 
evolutionary, requires co-ordi- 
nating intelligence, 44 

Motive is the man 123 

Motives, by which an unregen- 
erate person may be led to 
give preliminary attention to 

truth 119 

not causes but occasions of an 

action 121, 123 

free agency power to choose be- 
tween, 121, 122 

compounded of external pres- 
entations and internal dispo- 
sitions 122 

do not determine will 123 

will obeys them, yet is active, 
elective, sovereign in its 

obedience 123 

Mozley, on the two ruling ideas 

concerning God 143 

Miiller. Julius, his modified de- 
terminism 122 

on the attributes of God 189 

on Christ, if only human na- 
ture, necessarily sinful 205 

Mulford. Elisha. his theology 
tends to make God in hu- 
man spirit the only cause. 107 
Monger, Theodore T.. his New 

Theology 1*17 

Murphy on conscience as an evi- 
dence for God S4 

Xati consutnere fruges, who in 

Political Economy 449 

Natural Realism. Keid an advo- 
cate of, 01 



INDEX. 



621 



Nature, adaptations in, according 
to Positivism, results of 

mechanical laws, 12 

alone gives us no conception of 

mind or of God 23 

must be interpreted by our 

knowledge of mind 24 

its eonqaest by man. the idea 

of modern civilization 24 

becomes a revelation of God. 
if interpreted by what we 

find within ourselves, 29 

the term defined 132 

Nature, its uniformity, not abso- 
lute and universal 140 

not a truth of reason 141 

not supported by science, 141 

amenable to moral law 142 

the garment of Deity from 
which he can ' make bare 

his arm,' 390 

conquered by man's obedien 
Naville, Ernest, on human liber- 
ty 95 

Nazareth, its prominent features. 

482, 4S3 

Neaves. Lord, his witty lines on 

Mill and Hume 11 

Nebular hvpothesis, illustration 

from 2 

* Necessary, the.' and ' custo- 
mary ' cannot be confounded. 11 
Necessary laws of mind must be 
assumed in the very attempt 

to deny them 49 

Nero. Paul's direction to obey 

him. how to be understood. 402 
the philosophy of Nescience 

compared to 8 

Nescience, the philosophy of, de- 
nies direct knowledge of 

mind S 

demolishes all philosophy, .... S 

denies existence of mind S 

how it explains what is called 

' mind.' S 

regards thought as mere cere- 
bration, S 

looks upon religious and moral 
conceptions as only diseased 

imaginations 8 

Comte, its coryphaeus, 9 

its stock argument against The- 
ism, 51 

Nestorianism, nominalistic 164 

Newman. John Henry, his history 
affected by his idealistic no- 
tions, 7 

on miracles 13S 

Newton, his idea of gravitation, 33 
Niger, the river, an illustration 

from 1G 

Nile, description of 470 

XlXETY AND NlXE. LEAVING THE. 

36S-377 



Ninety and nine, usual interpre- 
tations of the parable 308 

author's interpretation 3G9 

Nominalism, what ? 1G4 

its two principal applications 

in theology 164 

atomistic 164 

as regards divine nature in- 
volves virtual tritheism. . . . 164 
conceives of the divine attri- 
butes as mere names 164 

regards mankind as a collec- 
tion of individuals 165 

inconsistent with a common 
Fall and common Redemp- 
tion 165 

Non pleni nasdmur, 101 

Non posse peccare, characteristic 

of whom 107 

Xon posse non peccare, charac- 
teristic of whom 107 

Noumena, testified to by reason. GO 

Oberlin " China Band." 385 

Obligation founded in the moral 

character of God 55 

Occam, an early Nominalist lf>4 

• Occasional cause,' what? 92 

CEdipus. his fate that also of 

evolution 46 

his fate an unchristian concep- 
tion 120 

Olives. Mount of, its appearance, 478 
Olshausen, on the word of God. 165 
on divine knowing being equal 

to willing 165 

Omar, the Saracen Caliph 485 

Omar Khayyam, his teaching, . . 533 
Oneness of self, origin of idea of 

unity in nature 22 

Oxlies, The Theee 544-546 

Ontological argument for exist- 
ence of God. founded on ab- 
stract necessary ideas of 

mind 84 

is now generally abandoned, . . S4 

its false assumption 84 

Orchids, Darwin on ' design ' in 
arrangements for their ferti- 
lization, 12 

Order, idea of, its origin 22 

Ordinances, their form signifi- 
cant 247 

their mutual order significant, 247 
because monumental, must have 
form carefully preserved. . . 247 
Oedixation, Councils of, theip. 

Powers axd Duties 259—268 

Ordination, Its importance 260 

of deacons 260, 268 

its preliminary stage 260 

its complementary stage 260 

the act of the local church, . . 260 

council but assistant in 260 

may be attended to in extreme 
cases without or in spite 
of a council, 260 



622 



INDEX. 



Ordination, its nature explained, 265 
certain accompaniments of , . . . 2G5 
import of prayer and laying-on 

of hands therein, 265, 266 

ministers coming from other 

bodies should receive, 266 

involves three things 266 

the public service in, its order 

detailed, '. 2G7 

to whom should it be granted, 2G8 
Ordination, councils of, they 

guard entrance of ministry, 259 
called into existence by local 

church 259 

have advisory power only, 259 

have moral influence, 259 

neglect of their advice, a se- 
rious step 200 

confer no special grace, 260 

help local churches to deter- 
mine upon call and qualifica- 
tions of candidate 200 

grant authorization to exercise 

gifts within denomination,.. 260 
may have unordained members, 261 
should discharge their duties 
most solemnly and scrupul- 
ously 261 

should bo effectively consti- 
tuted 262 

ministerial and lay elements in 
them ishould be properly bal- 
anced, 262 

their examination of candidates 

should be public, 262 

their deliberations subsequent 
to examination should be 

private 262 

proposed rules of procedure, 

2G3, 264 

Organization, only explicable on 
hypothesis of an organizing 
force superior to matter, .... 34 
"Orients himself," the expres- 
sion alluded to 302 

Origen on ' development ' in Gen- 
esis, 45 

Othello's treatment of Desde- 

mona referred to 5S0 

Ought, more imperative than self- 
interest, 54 

Oung-peu-la, its influence, 374 

Outness, what it is said and 

what it supposes, 67 

Overbeek's picture of the child- 
Christ, 202 

Ox-like character, what? 396 

P., impressed upon forehead of 

each penitent in Purgatory, 520 
Palaestra of the Greeks referred 

to 307 

Palestine, recollection of, .. .474— 479 
method of travelling in,.. 474, 475 
extent and accessibility of.... 47". 
its advantageous situation. 475. 470 
a sample land, 47'! 



Palestine, Mediterranean route 

through 476, 477 

its mountainousness, 477 

objects of visiting 470 

what it was to the Crusaders, 490 
Paley, utilitarian and materi- 
alistic, 5 

did not sufficiently recognize 

divine immanence, , 107 

Paradise, of the Divine Comal n. 

.. : 520-522 

its description the poet's lofti- 
est effort therein 518, 519 

its nature too elevated for pop- 
ular appreciation 519 

is a state of will freed from 

earthly desire 510 

in it, the capacity of perfection 

▼»!es r.19 

its law one of upward gravi- 
tation * 5]0 

Beatrice, Dante's guide in,... 519 
its outward surroundings ac- 
companiments of character, 519 

its heaven of the moon 519 

its heaven of Mercury, 520 

its heaven of Venus, 520 

its heaven of the Sun 520 

its heaven of Mars, . 520 

its heaven of Jupiter, 520 

its heaven of Saturn, 520 

its heaven of the Fixed Stars, 520 
its heaven of the Primum Mo- 

™e, 520 

among its privileges, a revela- 
tion of the Trinity in Unity, 520 
its ruling conception, light 

qualified by love 521 

in it, nearness to God and serv- 
ice to his creatures are com- 
bined 522 

rank in, determined by 
strength of vision of God, . . 522 
' The Rose of the Blessed,' its 
connection with the lower 

heavens 522 

constituted by a combination of 

holiness and love 523 

perfect sympathy and commun- 
ion between the spirits in,.. 523 
Parcimony, the law of, urged by 
Hamilton against Berkeley's 

views, 64 

Park. Dr., of Andover, on Orig- 
inal Sin 169 

on Will 169 

on Atonement, 174 

llappixvia, its meaning enlarged 

on, 555 

Pascal, on the mutual dependence 

of miracles and morals 131 

Pastor, Mental Qualities 

Requisite to, 566-569 



INDEX. 



Paul, by Inspiration reached a 
point where divine sover- 
eignty and human freedom 
appeared in harmony, . .115, 116 

his speech on Mars Hill 181 

his designations of himself in 
his earlier and later epistles 
a mark of growth in grace, 210 
Peabody, Ephraim, his illustra- 
tion of miracle, 139* 140 

Pelagian view of original deprav- 
ity arises from a false view 

of will 101 

Pelagius, his error according to 

N. W. Taylor 169 

Penance, its three elements 51G 

Penny, parable of, its meaning, 1G0 
Perception, internal, a dual cog- 
nition 43 

Perfection the fundamental at- 
tribute of God 51 

Persian controversial maxim,... 244 
Personality, the grounds on which 

it is attributed to God 52 

consistent with the uniformity 

of his operations, 52 

Peter of Picardy 4S7 

preaches crusades 487 

at Council of Clermont, 4S7 

Peter's, St., at Rome, alluded to. 

3, 242 

Phenomena, the narrower and 

larger meaning of the term. 30 
Philippians 2:12, 13, com- 
mented on 115-117 

Philosophy axd Religion, .... 1-18 
Philosophy, at the basis of re- 
ligion as a science, 2 

answers the questions of the 
logical understanding as to 

religion. 3 

deals with underlying facts, . . 3 

analytic in its method, 3 

it defines and correlates prim- 
ary conceptions of revelation, 3 
furnishes with scientific ac- 
curracy the facts of man's 
mental constitution which 
are required by Theology, 3. 4 
has given Theology its logical 

order, 4 

its modern contributions to re- 
ligion. 5 

through Theology it affects the 
practical life of church and 

nation 5 

its dangers are also those of 

religion 5 

and religion, both inclined to a 

vicious monism 5, 

Idealistic, its influence on John 

Henry Newman 7 

Materialistic, its influence on 

Joseph Priestley 7 

Sensational, its influence on 
France, 7 



Philosophy, Kantian, its Influ- 
ence on Germanv o 

of Nescience, altogether antag- 
onistic to Christianity y 9 

an impartial, essential to the 
perfect triumph of religion 14 

a true, a weapon for subduing 
the world to Christ 14 

will exist while world stands' 14 

a source of discipline and 
strength for the preacher. . . 14 

a true and false have been side 
by side in all ages of the 
world ]5 

is now being prosecuted accord- 
ing to inductive methods,. 10 

a true, secured by retention of 
the fundamental farts of 
consciousness jq 

vitiated by Hamilton's doctrine 
of the relativity of knowl- 
edge 1G 

finds its highest province in the 
interpretation and defence of 
the intuition of God, 17 

of Hegel, its influence, .' .' 31 

the Mechanical, its present in- 
fluence accounted for 31 

the fashion of, changes, 31, 30, 2^3 

false, bears relation to periods 
of national decadence, .. .31, 32 

every false, has its modicum of 



truth, 



32 



Phh.o SOPHY of Evolution, The. 

39-57 

Philosophy, Cosmic 39-57 

Physical research, undue prose- 
cution of, its influence on our 

age- 32 

Physician, the proper character- 
istics of i9 

in danger of materialism, 20 

a, who learned the divinity of 
Christ while praying to him 

on behalf of a patient 211 

Physicians admonished 30 

Piacenza, Council of, 487 

Picture, a, not explained by an 
inventory of the colors which 

compose it 23 

Pilgrimage, its history is4 

Pilgrims to Holy Sepulchre, their 

fanaticism. 478 

washing in Jordan 478 

Pisans invade Syria, 48G 

Pitti Palace, a suggestive combi- 
nation of heathen and reli- 
gious art in 413 

Poet, his three-fold function, .... 326 
can only take up a department 

of poetry, 52S 

must show the essential truth 

of things 52 

must have a large knowledge, . . 5 



624 



INDEX. 



Poet, must have right views of 

human nature, 532, 533 

must have proper views of 

God, 533, 534 

must have right views of the 
relations between man and 

God, 534 

Poetry and Robert Browning, 

525-543 

Poetry, a new definition of 520 

deals with the universe 527 

cannot be compassed by any 

one finite mind, 527 

must idealize, 531-530 

does not yield its full meaning 

to cursory perusal, 539 

requires lucid construction, 537-539 
requires rhythmical and musi- 
cal expression 541 

Political Economy, its relation 

to Christianity, 443 

what it is not, 443 

includes moral influences, 443 

Storch's definition of, 443 

DeQuincey's view of it, . . .443, 444 
its great principles have been 

generally settled, 444 

coextensive with humanity, . . 444 
it seeks to discover the methods 
and results of the principle 

of self-interest, 444 

recognizes self-love as a ration- 
al principle 444 

allied to Moral Philosophy, .... 444 
a branch of Christianity in the 

concrete, 445 

recognizes manhood as su- 
preme, 446 

gives an honorable place to 

human labor 446 

is not materialistic, 447 

its idea of service, 448 

benevolence, inherent in, 450 

a witness to Christianity 458 

not against wealth, 462 

Political Economy and Christian- 
ity connected by their inner- 
most principles, 444 

their mutual influence 445 

any apparent antagonism be- 
tween them is hurtful, . .445, 446 
their relation one of pre-exist- 

ent harmony, 446 

are parts of one great system, 446 

a human element in both 440 

both make man king of this 

lower world, 447 

a social element in both, 44S 

both recognize men's mutual 

needs and interdependence. . . 448 
both insist on value of ' serv- 
ice,' 449 

both estimate labor according 
to mental and moral ele- 
ments which enter into it... 449 
40 



Political Economy and Chris- 
tianity, both teach that the 
service of others is compat- 
ible with one's highest inter- 
ests 449 

they differ mainly in their 
points of view and fields of 
activity, 450 

application of their common 
principles to Capital and 
Labor, 451-457 

their rules will yet regulate 
mankind, 456, 457 

some questions to which their 
joint principles might be ap- 
plied, 45S 

they give the same truths on 
different planes 458 

one illustrates the other 458 

stand to each other as Mosaic 
law to Christianity, 459 

are indissolubly connected, .... 459 

are not co-ordinate 459 

their connection illustrated by 

banyan-tree 400 

Polo. Marco, his travels, 500 

Pompeii, frescoes of, 50 

Pope, the, 'a servant of servants,' 210 
Porter, his criticism of Hamilton, 62 

on efficient causes subordinate 

to final causes, 141 

Positivism, denies knowledge of 

human mind, 8 

denies metaphysics, 8, 13 

admits only a spontaneous vege- 
tative life 8 

denies God, freedom, con- 
science, immortality, 8 

accepted by minds of much eru- 
dition and acumen 8 

has permeated the literature of 
the day, 8 

has effected in many cases un- 
consciously our theological 
views, 9 

its coryphaeus, Auguste Comte, 9 

its postulate, nothing known 
but material phenomena.... 9 

denies both efficient and final 
causes, 10, 12 

its teachings contradict con- 
sciousness 9 

its teachings invalidates all 
knowledge and science 9 

teaches that cause is merely 
regularity of sequence 10 

teaches that law is an arbitrary 
succession of phenomena, ... 10 

teaches ex nihilo omnia punt,. . 10 

denies causal judgment. 11 

abolishes inductive logic 11 

immolates the intuitions. ... 11, 13 

makes mathematical truth pure- 
ly phenomenal 11 

makes morality mere matter of 
convention, 11 



INDEX. 



623 



Positivism, denies conscience 11 

denies purpose in universe 11 

makes biology a part of physi- 
ology 11 

relegates theology and meta- 
physics to the infancy of the 

race 13 

denies God, 13 

insists on mere uniformity of 

nature, 13 

its new cult described, ..13, 14 
in its crude form, rejected by 

Spencer 49 

Positivists. numerous, intelligent 

and of all shades 8 

deny purpose in universe,. . .11, 12 
merge final causes in totality 

of secondary causes 12 

their inference, that supposed 
imperfections in design im- 
plies absence of purpose, re- 
plied to 12 

unconsciously use language 
which implies the adaptation 

they explicitly deny 12 

beg the question, 20 

Posse non peccare and posse pec- 
care, Augustine's formula of 
man's moral state in Eden, 107 
Pounds, the parable of, its mean- 
ing, 1G1 

Poverty, not required by Chris- 
tianity, 461 

Powell, Baden, denies the literal 
destruction of the world by 

fire 9 

Power behind phenomena, an ir- 
resistible, 11 

its type and proof in the ac- 
tion of our will on our or- 
ganism, 11 

Power, has its seat in mind 25 

Power in unregenerate to avoid 

certain sins, 118, 119 

to make himself more or less 

depraved 119 

to suspend evil actions and give 
attention to considerations 

which urge obedience, 119 

a reward of heaven, 161 

Preacher, should set forth true 

philosophical principles 13 

and audience, their casual rela- 
tions 211 

and audience, sure to meet 

again 211 

Preacher's Doubts, The. ... 578-580 
Preaching, a development of the 

revealed word 545 

why supposed by some to have 

lost its power 551 

'Prelude. The,' of Wordsworth, 

quoted, 17 

Preservation, self-, the law of 

life , 191 



President, The Death of the, 

347-357 

Press, the weapon of the church, 243 
Pressure, requires something that 
presses and something that is 

pressed, 43 

1 Priesthood, a Chronic Disorder 

of the Human Race,' 566 

Priestley, Joseph, his philosophy 

affects his theology 7 

Priests more powerful aud uni- 
versal than kings 77 

Primogeniture, Dr. Johnson's sar- 
castic eulogy of 462 

Primum mobile, according to 

Dante, 509 

Principles often assumed which on 
formal statement would be 

repudiated 245 

Probation, individual as well as 

racial, 119 

sinner's individual, not removed 

by inborn character 125 

after death, its relations to 

New England Theology, .... 126 
a fair one in Adam prevents in- 
ference of a further one after 

death, 127 

individual, is of grace, 127 

according to Scripture, ends 

with this life 127 

second, doctrine examined, 174-177 
is the phrase correct?. ... 174, 175 
is the present a proper one for 

all? 175 

rests on nominalistic individ- 
ualism 175 

is neutralized only by Scrip- 
ture doctrine of organic unity 

of race, 175 

virtually denies guilt of man- 
kind 175 

second, Scriptures oppose, .... 177 
Production, we are bound to the 

utmost possible, 463 

Christian, ultimately that of 

holiness in the earth 463 

economical, may be as extensive 
as you please, if subservient 

to religious production 464 

Productive and unproductive la- 
bor, Dr. Chalmers on, 449 

Professional man, the worthy, his 

characteristics, 19 

Professions, the three, their mu- 
tual relations, 19 

learned, not now three but a 

dozen 283, 284 

Professor's Chair, Learning in 

the 344-346 

Promise, the first 391 

Propagation, science recognizes 
more than one way of, in 
same species 205 



INDEX. 



Prophesying, New Testament, 

what? 553 

Protoplasm, its relation to life, 34 

living and dead, 34 

Providence, Guizot's comparison 

of, to Homer's gods, 390 

Providence and Holy Spirit, mu- 
tually supplementary 557 

Prudens quccstio, its value in sci- 
ence 82 

Psalm 104, its main thought 181 

Psychical processes, their relation 

to physical 40 

'Psychology without a soul,'.. 09 
Ptolemy, his astronomical views, 508 
Publication Society, American 

Baptist, its origin, 23S 

based on a conviction that truth 

is an organic whole, 238 

based on a conviction that spe- 
cial truths have been entrust- 
ed to the keeping of the Bap- 
tist denomination 242 

based on a conviction that mod- 
ern needs require modern 

measures 243 

the success which has attended 

its publications 243 

Punishment, what? 192 

the impulse in 194 

never referred to love 195 

of wicked, consent of saints 

thereto 195 

a manifestation of self-vindicat- 
ing holiness 195 

Punishment, future, alleged bene- 
ficial effects 190, 197 

Beecher on 19C< 

teaching of Universalists, 190, 197 

Parker, Joel, on, 197 

Patton, F. L., on 197 

its reason lies in divine holi- 
ness 197 

Purgatory, according to Romish 

doctrine, 515 

according to Dante, 515 

and Hell, how related in Di- 
vine Comedy, 516 

is divided into Ante-Purgatory 

and Purgatory proper, . .515, 516 
a process rather than a place, 517 
has clear analogies in our 

every-day life, 518 

in the sense of a post mortem 

purification, unscriptural . . . . 518 
faith in it often leads to fatal 

procrastination 518 

its purification unscripturally 

represented as penal 518 

Purity, what? 189 

of soul, gives clear instinct of 

immortality 191 

Purpose in nature, denied by 

Comte 2G 



78 



148 



Pyramid, the Great, ascent and 

I entrance of, 471-473 

(Qualities, secondary, what? 62 

primary, what ? 62 

Quality, Mill's definition of 22 

Quatrefages, on limited geograph- 
ical distribution of Atheism, 
Quenstedt, on the human element 
in Holy Scripture being due 

to inspiration 

Quincy. President of Harvard, 
anecdote of his opposition to 

co-education, 425 

Quincy, Mass., educational revolu- 
tion there 420 

Race, modern idea of its solidar- 
ity anticipated in Scripture.. 103 

according to nominalism, 105 

atomistic account of, 105 

realistic doctrine of, 165 

a tree, 165 

Adam once the race 165 

the doctrine of its oneness, an 
antidote to the exaggerated 
individualism of the day,... 178 
oneness of, its relation to min- 
istry and missions, 179 

Race-sin, ignored by New Theol- 
ogy, 166 

Rangoon, prayer-meeting in heath- 
en temple at 279 

Realism, Natural, as held by 

Reid 01 

as held by Sir W. Hamilton, . . 62 

and Idealism compared 03-71 

its simplest form, 06 

possesses the universal belief 

of mankind, 66 

represents the facts of experi- 
ence 67-69 

an objectionable form of 164 

its teaching on the divine at- 
tributes 16." 

mediaeval 165 

asserts real historical connec- 
tion of race 165 

Reason, a system whose order 
satisfies, must have sprung 
from a designing intelligence, 34 
Redeemed in heaven, may render 

service to God's creatures, . . 520 
Reflection, what, according to 

Locke, 58 

Regeneration, the only parallel 
afforded in experience to the 

apostasy of the Fall 110 

not a mechanical work 125 

not produced by mere moral 

suasion, 125 

produced by Christ's entrance 

into soul 125 

its relation to conversion 125 

mans' will active in, 125 

not a miracle 132 

and union with Christ 224 



INDEX. 



621 



Reid, Dr. Thomas, his contention 

against Hume 61 

advocated ' Philosophy of Com- 
mon Sense,' Gl 

his Natural Realism <>1 

his inaccuracies 61 

his services to philosophy 61 

Sir W. Hamilton's annotations 

on 62 

Relativity of knowledge, conse- 
quences of doctrine of 16 

Religion, speculative and practi- 
cal 2 

as it exists in mind of child aud 

of theologian 2 

each of its sides tends to repro- 
duce the other 2 

its debt to philosophy 2-5 

rests on philosophy 2, 3 

owes to philosophy the defining 
and correlating of its prim- 
ary conceptions 3-5 

its relations to Scholasticism,. . 4 

its relations to Platonism, 4 

its relations to Aristotelianism, 4 
its relations to modern philos- 
ophy, 4 

and science, condition of their 

harmony 20 

and science, the truth common 
to both, according to Spen- 
cer, 52 

what, according to Spencer. ... 53 
not a mere sense of mystery 

and dependence 53 

men must have, 77 

faculty of, disclosed by pres- 
ence of superstition, 79 

true, what it is 224 

its origin not in fears, 391 

Remarriage, prohibition of, only 
penalty for adultery in Amer- 
ican law, 433 

of a person who has a former 
husband or wife living, fel- 
ony in Tennessee 433 

of a woman divorced in Ken- 
tucky upheld by a Tennessee 

court 433 

of a woman in New York State, 
married in New York State, 
but divorced in Ohio, declared 
void in New York courts, . . 437 
not permitted by Paul, even in 
cases of wilful desertion, . . 438 
Remarriage of guilty party to a 
divorce, forbidden during life- 
time of innocent complainant 
by Revised Statutes of New 

York State until 1S79 433 

though contracted outside of 
New York State, declared in 
one case by New York courts 
null and void, 433 



Remarriage of guilty party to 
a divorce, if divorce decreed 
in Massachusetts, though 
contracted outside of that 
State, by Statute declared 
null and void 433 

no express declaration in New 
York State Statutes that even 
if contracted outside of State, 
it is null and void 433 

if valid according to laws of 
any State, valid in New York 
State 433 

dictum of Justice Johnson in 
Court of Appeals regarding, 435 

puts the contractor under legal 
ban in New York State 436 

a misdemeanor in New York 
State but not bigamy, polyg- 
amy or adultery, 436 

contractor guilty of contempt of 
New York courts 436 

prohibition of, has no effect out- 
side of New York State, .... 436 
Remarriage in case of divorce on 

ground of adultery, permitted to 
innocent party, 439 

that it is not permitted to guil- 
ty party an inference from 
the silence of Christ 440 

its permissibility to guilty par- 
ty, Dr. Woolsey on 440 

of guilty party, a violation of 
law of Scripture and of State, 440 
Remorse, more than sense of unfit- 
ness to surroundings, 53 

Renan, on the Beatitudes, 415 

Reparation, the desire to make, il- 
lustrations of 216 

Representative idea, Reid upon. . . 61 
• Respect the dreams of thy 

youth,* 19, 544 

Responsibility, coextensive with 

our range of active being, . . 97 

for native depravity 101 

for human nature, 101 

Resurrection of Christ, the central 

miracle of Christianity, .... 144 

its evidence, 145 

its probative value 145 

main subject of apostolic 
preaching, 145 

teaching of ordinances 145 

Revelation, an external, affords 

material for science 75 

internal and external, their 
connection 172 

book of, significance of fact that 

Scripture ends with 363 

Revolution, French, its connec- 
tion with philosophical teach- 
ings 7 

Revolutions, break out from be- 
low 488, 489 



628 



INDEX. 



Revue Chrctienne, on will as a 
choice between pre-existent 

motives, 97 

Reward, a peculiar, for each 

Christian worker, 100 

of duty done, power to do more, 161 
Rewards, are ' according to 

works,' 1G0 

in what sense the same 1G0 

in what sense differing 161 

of heaven, what? 161 

Rhine steamer and barge, illus- 
tration from 465, 466 

Richardson, the extreme senti- 
mentality of his Clarissa, . . 53G 

Richter, Jean Paul, 156 

Right, and wrong, reduced to con- 
ventionalism by Positivism, 11 
never confounded with advan- 
tage, in language of world. . . 53 
as a result of ancestral experi- 
ences, 53 

as the adaptation of constitu- 
tion to circumstances, 53 

an idea not inherent in things 
or actions, but brought to 

them by the mind, 54 

an intuition, 54 

and wrong, knoAvledge of, is an 
original cognitive power of 

mind 77 

binds because it is the nature 

of God, 197 

its full siguficance known only 

at the judgment 197 

Righteousness, the supreme attri- 
bute in man 195 

'Ring and the Book,' quotation 

from 36 

its subject described 529-531 

its method defended 538, 539 

Ritual of divine appointment, pro- 
foundly spiritual 247 

Robertson, F. W., on the make 

up of truth 5, 6 

his compassion for the sincere 

doubter, 23 

his impatience with self-com- 
placent infidelity 23 

on the folly of attempting the 
reconciliation of truths 
which though apparently con- 
tradictory are yet both true, 115 
on the doubt of God's person- 
ality being more terrible than 
that of one's immortality, . . . 186 
Robinson, Dr., his anecdote of a 
mother's consecration of her 

boy to the ministry 291, 292 

Rochester, N. Y., a city of re- 
vivals 387 

Rochester Theological Seminary, 
its curriculum described, 

305, 306 

addresses to graduating classes 
at S44-586 



Rochester Theological Seminary, 
author's address on occasion of 
graduation of his first thro- 
logical class at 546-548 

allusion to its first quarter of 

a century of existence, 554 

Rockefeller Hall, its dedication, 302 
Rome, as depicted in Revelation, 358 
Roscelin, a mediaeval nominalist, 1G4 
'Rose of the Blessed," accord- 
ing to Dante 509 

Rossetti, Miss P. M., her "Shad- 
ow of Dante," 501, 506 

Rothe, his conception of the di- 
vine attributes, 164 

Royce, an American Hegelian, ... 61 
Safford, Daniel, his idea of benev- 
olence, 4G4 

Sakkara, Apis-cemetery at 470 

Salvation, entirely of God, ..103, 104 

Indian's view of, 105 

Arminian view of, 105 

man's ability in, from God... 113 
recognition of God's working 

in, tends to practical religion, 117 
limitations of divine agency in, 117 

Samaritan Pentateuch 482 

Samuel, Second, 2 : 23 347 

Saracenic, invasion of Europe, . . 485 
civilization threatened Europe, 485 
Satan, Milton's and Dante's con- 
ceptions of, compared 513 

Savings-Banks, an accompaniment 

of civilization, 462 

Schelling, his view of human 

knowledge, 8 

held a direct intuition of self 

and God, 60 

how his system differs from 

Fichte's, 60 

Scholasticism, its influence on 

Theology 4 

Schools, large, their advantages 

and disadvantages 429 

Schopenhauer, a valuable contrib- 
utor to facts of man's nature, 97 

Science, what it is, 9 

a pre-equipment of mind neces- 
sary to 9 

involves mind as well as matter, 9 
ideas as well as facts essential 

to, 10 

larger than observation and 

classification 20 

its terms derive value from 

metaphysics 21 

has, according to Spencer, a 
truth in common with reli- 
gion 52 

assumes order and useful collo- 
cation in the universe 82 

faitli at basis of all science, 88 

how related to religion 459 

Scriptures. Holy, place of rea- 
son in relation to, 572-57! 



iXDEX. 



82D 



fleets, their place In the dis- 

semination of truth 241. 242 

Selenology, the assumed science 

of, on what dependent ? 73 

Self, its cognition necessary to 
the idea of unity in mental 

phenomena OS 

Self -consciousness, a valid source 

of knowledge 20 

the nature and value of its 
testimony to existence of the 

ego GS 

Self-denial, its reflex influence 

on church, 374 

moves the heart of God 37G 

Self-interest, the fundamental 

law of Political Economy, . . 444 

has its morals, 444 

its relation to universal benev- 
olence 444, 443 

Bascom on, 459 

man's highest, often at war 

with lower principles 458 

man's highest, its attainment 
requires a power outside hu- 
man nature 450 

Selfishness, not the best policy, 

450. 457 

Self-limitation of God. in design 

and creation, 12 

makes knowledge of him pos- 
sible, 51 

as to his moral nature, the 

completest 51, 76 

imposed only from within 76 

in the person of Christ 186 

Self-love, its place in Christian- 
ity and Political Economy, 

450, 451 

Self-mastery 562-566 

Seljuks, conquest of Palestine by, 488 
treatment of Christian pil- 
grims by 4SS 

Seminaries of Hamilton and 

Rochester, their relations, . . 314 
Seminary. Theological, its site 

should be a large city. ..298. 311 
should be liberally supported 

by the churches, 301 

what its departments should 

be 303. 304 

requires the ablest instructors 

possible 304 

the salaries of its professors, 305 
should be a store-house of lit- 
erature, 306 

should have a library, museum, 

and lectureships, 306 

training of the vocal organs 
should be a part of its 

course 307 

supports of students at. . . 307, 30S 
relations between its professors 

and students 310, 311, 318 

its chapel services, 312 



Seminary, Theological. Its influ- 
ence most permanent 313 

trains leaders for the churches. 316 
must not become a kindergar- 
ten 316 

should combine practical with 

theoretical teaching 317 

should insist on highest and 

widest culture 318 

seeks to ground in the revealed 

word, 545 

its educators do not require 
servile acquiescence in their 

instructions 547 

the twofold aim of its discip- 
line, 547 

seeks to develop habits of earn- 
est, independent investiga- 
tion 547 

seeks to encourage a spirit of. 

love 547 

should not cultivate the intel- 
lect exclusively 547 

its leaching should set forth a 

definite body of truth 558 

Seneca, on innate depravity. . . 101 
Sensations, Berkeley's view of, 58 
may be caused by God directly, 58 
only objects of knowledge, .... 38 
only deal with points in ex- 
ternal material, mind cog- 
nizes substance, 68 

Sensation proper, according to 

Hamilton, 62 

Sensational school, French, 

Locke's relation to, 5S 

Sensationalism of Locke, its out- 
come 7 

Sensationalism, rhetorical 571 

its cure, 571 

Sense-experiences of past gener- 
ations the alleged source of 

a priori ideas, 49 

Sense-perception, according to 

Kant 60 

Sentimentality, Its definition by 

Mill 536 

Separation of an illegally mar- 
ried pair not always expedi- 
ent 440 

Sepulchre, Church of Holy, scene 

at. on Good Friday, 478 

description of 479 

' Service.' its place in Political 

Economy 448 

Seth, a Hegelian 61 

'' Seven 'Togethers.' " 234 

Shakespeare, on complementary 

relation of the sexes 204 

hides his personality in his 

dramas 527 

Shepherd, Good, Christ as, paint- 
Shelley, his musical expression. 541 
ed on communion-cups and 
walls of catacombs, 36S 



630 



INDEX. 



SJgnality, the determining fea- 
ture of miracles 138 

Simony, its future punishment 

according to Dante, 512 

Sin, according to Hegelianism, . . Gl 

Romish view of 102 

its origin discussed 108-1 1 1 

its source, an evil disposition, 111 
racial as well as personal, . . 124 

self -isolating 217 

contemptible, the teaching of 
the symbolism of the Divine 

Comedy, 513 

self -perversion of will, accord- 
ing to Dante 513 

its future penalty, according to 
Dante, not essentially ex- 
ternal to the sufferer, 514 

according to Dante, tends to 

premanence 514, 515 

Sinful nature, why man is re- 
sponsible for, 118 

'Sinner, the,' why? 158 

Sins, of each individual peculiar 

to the transgressor 257 

their three-fold division accord- 
ing to Dante 511 

seven capital 516 

Skepticism, Materialistic, ..31-38 
Skepticism, modern, its drift and 

character 29, 31 

Smith, Adam, taught Political 
Economy in connection with 

Moral Science, 443 

the founder of the science of 

Political Economy 443 

Smith, Goldwin, on the automat- 
ic theory of human nature, 27, 28 

Smith, H. B., on causes, 92 

Smith, Sydney, his witticism on 

Berkeley and Hume, 59 

his opinion on the difference 

between men and women,.. 403 

Smyth, Dr. Newman, on a fair 

probation either in a pre-ex- 

istent state or after death, 127 

Social questions, the problems of 

the present, 452 

Social Unions, their best func- 
tions, 461 

Solipsism, Idealism logically 

leads to, 169 

Son of man, the term implies 

more than humanity 206 

'Sung of Moses and the Lamb,' 

why the redeemed sing 365 

Sorcery, its future punishment 

according to Dante 512 

Soul, what in opinion of Humist, 50 
present in every part of body 

at once, 51 

a mental image of. impossible, 51 

as defined by Berkeley 59 

God can work in 152 



Southern cross, according to 
Dante, shines on Mount of 

Penitence 515 

Sovereignty, divine, and human 
freedom, both facts, though 
irreconcilable by our powers, 6 
Space an a priori truth, cannot 
be figured to the imagina- 
tion 48, 51 

Speculation, however lofty, filters 

down to the people, 5, 55 

Spencer, Herbert, advocate of 

philosophy of Nescience 8 

materialistic in his philoso- 
phy, 31 

his one postulate, the persist- 
ence of force, 40 

his vicious use of a priori rea- 
soning 41 

does not regard force as con- 
nected with will, 42 

is logically an Absolute Ideal- 
ist, 43 

sets forth a method of the di- 
vine working, 44 

ignores or denies important 
facts 44 

fails to explain origin of life 
and mind, 44, 45 

deserves thanks for emphasiz- 
ing truth of development in 
creation, 45 

regard 3 universe as consisting 
only of one substance, 47 

his theory of knowledge unsat- 
isfactory 47, 48, 49 

not a Positivist, . . , 49 

recognizes a priori elements in 
human knowledge, 49 

the origin he assigns to a 
p7iori elements, 49 

makes cognition to be recogni- 
tion, 49 

his explanation of existence of 
intuitions 50 

a materialistic idealist, 50 

a Humist, 50, 59 

declares God to be inconceiv- 
able and unknown 50 

his idea of ' conceive,'. .. .50, 51 

on the absolute and Infinite 
as unknown, 50 

attacks personality of God, . . 52 

on the truth which is common 
to religion and science, 52, 53 

his explanation of the exist- 
ence of the feeling of obli- 
gation B3, 54 

makes an action right becaus i 
useful 54, 55 

what he considers conscience 
as 55 

regards the will as externally 
necessitated 55 

is a monist . 55 



INDEX. 



631 



Spencer, Herbert, his system de- 
lusively simple 55 

bis teaching acceptable to 
those who dread a personal, 
holy God, 55 

his teaching destructive to mor- 
ality, art and literature, .... 50 

his system open to a reductio 
ad absurdum, 58 

on the cognition of self, 70 

his explanation of idea of God, 87 

on advantages of varied en- 
vironment 42S 

his dictum of style, 537 

Spending and giving, a test of 

character 467 

Spinoza, on design implying im- 
perfection in designer 12 

Spirit, Holy, some of his influ- 
ences may be resisted 128 

some of his influences sufficient 
to secure acceptance of 
Christ, 128 

helps us to think ourselves into 
God's thoughts 254 

helps to believing utterance of 
truth 254 

communicates contagious zeal, 255 

associates laborer in sympa- 
thy with God's heart 255 

grants matter and manner of 
speech 255, 250 

his stimulation healthy, 250 

makes the teacher a magnet, 256 

uses agents sometimes uncon- 
sciously, 25G 

bestowed by the Savior in rec- 
ompense for his sufferings, . . 257 

from him who receives him he 
in turn flows forth to oth- 
ers 257 

his ordinary illumination of be- 
lievers, its relation to prop- 
er Inspiration 170 

makes us understand truth, . . 171 

he revives and applies a past 
revelation 172 

turns the outer into an inner 
word, 172 

is the organ of internal revel- 
ation 172, 251 

his office must not be exalted 
at expense of work of Christ, 172 

every true teacher his assist- 
ant 250 

brings spiritual blessing to the 
true teacher, 251 

is not the invisible presence of 
Christ 251 

as sunlight on a darkened land- 
scape 251 

as oculist who removes a cat- 
aract 251 

in him is the returning activity 
of the Godhead 252 

is necessary to God himself, . . 252 



Spirit, Holy, manifests tbe 

secrets of eternity 252 

an inexhaustible reservoir al- 
ways available, 253 

sensitizes the heart, 253 

Spoils-system, Garfield's assassi- 
nation due to 352 

the system explained 352 

its unwholesome influence, 352, 353 
its operation at New York Cus- 
tom House 352 

its wide extent 353 

occupies unduly the time of 

President and Cabinet, 353 

defended by Garfield as Repub- 
lican nominee 353, 354 

Garfield, as President, carries 

it out 354 

Its monstrosity will secure its 

abandonment, 356 

State, the individual's relation 

to, according to modern view, 207 
should leave trade and com- 
merce alone, 450 

Stephen, the protomartyr, first 

philosophic historian 337 

Stoics, 15 

Strikes, wholesome change of 

feeling in relation to, ..454, 455 
Stuart, Moses, his influence on 

Bible study 331 

Substance, an a priori truth, .... 48 

cognized by mind, 60 

known to God and man, 60 

its cognition necessary to idea 
of unity in material phenom- 
ena 68 

material, its cognition as in- 
evitable an act of reason 
as the cognition of mental 
substance or conscious self, 68 
Suicide, its future punishment ac- 
cording to Dante 512 

Superintendence of universe, 

God's, 46 

God's, its existence and nature 
set forth by facts of crea- 
tion 46, 47 

Support of theological students 

vindicated 308 

Sweden, progress of Baptist prin- 
ciples in 243 

Swinburne, Algernon, his sensu- 
ous paganism 50 

deifies the body, 536 

Swiss valley, illustration from 

incident in 376, 377 

Sword, Edenic, a manifestation 

of wrath 392 

Sychar, a Sunday at, 482 

Sympathy, not a sufficient expla- 
nation of man's responsibil- 
ity for Adam's sin, US 

its nature 56S 

its excellencies 569 



G.J2 



INDEX. 



Synergism, unscriptural 105 

denied by Paul 117 

Synthetic conception, what?.... 60 
Systems, delusive sometimes 
through superficial simpli- 
city G 

may become simple through mu- 
tilation, 6 

Tabula rasa, mind at first is not 

a 101 

Tahiti, Ellis on the condition of 

woman there 44 

Taine, his materialistic tenden- 
cy, 31 

Tait, on the impossibility of a 
priori reasoning demonstrat- 
ing any physical fact, . . . .40, 41 
Talbot, on metaphysics dealing 

with realities 283 

Tandem-team idea of salvation, 

unscriptural, 117 

Tastes, God cares for them 465 

Taylor, Isaac, on the influence of 
their physical surroundings 
on the authors of the Bible, 47G 
Taylor. N. W., on Imputation,.. 169 

on Depravity, 169 

on Sin 169 

on Will, 169 

on Pelagius, 169 

Teacher's, The, Guide and 

IlELrER, 250-25S 

Teacher, the true, a helper of 

the Spirit, 250 

dependent on Spirit as organ 

of internal revelation, 251 

dependent on Spirit as refluent 

movement of divine activity, 252 
dependent on Spirit to render 

heart of auditor sensitive, 253 
dependent on Spirit for a life 
which may incarnate the 

truth 254 

dependent on Spirit for emo- 
tional intensity, 254, 25-j 

dependent on Spirit for union 

with God 255 

dependent on Spirit for what 

he shall speak 255 

dependent on Spirit for how he 

shall speak 255 

dependent on Spirit for when 

he shall speak, 255 

the true, receives the Spirit 

from Christ 257 

by an act of surrender and 

" faith, 257 

to make him a blessing to oth- 
ers 257 

Teacher, in a theological school, 

why ordained? 324 

of New Testament Language 
and Interpretation, should 

teach thoroughly 325 

should arrive at fixed opinions 
on diflicult questions, 325 



Teacher, of N. T. Exegesis, 
should cultivate breadth, ..... 325 

should exhibit boldness, 326 

should cherish independence, . . 327 

should be earnest 327 

should be reverent 328 

should be lovingly studious of 

God's word 328 

Teaching truth, as the scatter- 
ing of perfumes in a tri- 
umphal progress 250 

Teleological argument for the ex- 
istence of God 81, 82 

more carefully stated 82 

invalidity of common objec- 
tions to 82 

its exact value, 83 

its limitations, 83 

Telescope, as an illustration, .... 69 

Tennyson, Lord 

21, 28, 28, 30, 38, 204, 204 

his portrait 525 

is he a religious poet? 535 

compared with Browning 535 

Theism, the stock objection of 
the philosophy of Nescience 

to, 51 

Theism, Scientific, 75-89 

Theism, Scientific, possible, 75 

its assumptions possible, .... 86 

Theodoric, 17 

Theologic thought like a pendu- 
lum, 8 

Theological education, its true 

idea 302 

Theological students, their sup- 
port should be by gift not 

loan 309 

should be regulated by their 
manifested activity intellec- 
tually and morally, 309 

Theological students, why thought 

irreverent ? 312 

Theology, its beginnings, 3 

combines facts of revelation 

and facts of consciousness, 3 
how far it gets its facts from 

philosophy, 3 

synthetic in its methods, .... 3 
knowledge of its history re- 
quires some study of philoso- 
phy, 5 

contains factors logically irre- 
concilable, 

Theology and Philosophy, their 

different methods 3 

their mutual influence evidenced 
in state of modern Conti- 
nental thought 8 

Theology, Comte's view of 13 

its relation to Revelation, . . 75 

Theolugy, The Will in 90-113 

Theology, the two principal ap- 
plications of Nominalism in. 164 
Theology, The New 164-179 



INDEX. 



633 



Theology, The New, exaggerates 

individualism 1G4 

its historical connections, . .164-170 
has a source in mediaeval 

nominalism 164 

nominalistic 164 

false by defect 160 

oreatian, 106 

atomistic 166 

lias a source in modern Ideal- 
ism 166 

is indebted to Jonathan Ed- 
wards, 167 

exaggerates the divine imma- 
nence, 167 

its prominent specific ideas, 170-177 
borrows from many but re- 
lated schools 170 

its doctrine of Christian con- 
sciousness, 170 

its practical results, 178, 179 

its teachings affect family life, 178 
tends to rationalism rather 

than mysticism, 172 

has emphasized the Spirit's 

work, 172 

its doctrine of the extra-tem- 
poral Christ, 172-174 

emphasizes a valuable truth, . . 173 
obscures the historic Christ, . . 173 
obscures the objective Atone- 
ment 173, 174 

its doctrine of second proba- 
tion, 174-177 

teaches that sin consists in 

sinning 175 

teaches that dispositions are 

only sinful as leading to sin, 175 
weakens our convictions of 

guilt of heathen 176 

its teachings affect church-life, 

178, 179 

loses some sublime conceptions, 179 

its influence on ministry 179 

its influence on missions, 179 

Theology, New England, its teach- 
ers 169 

rejects exercise-system 169 

becomes unmitigatedly individ- 
ualistic 169 

its tendency, 170 

Theology, Historical, its two 

branches, 304 

Pastoral, a part of a Theolog- 
ical Seminary training 304 

Practical, a part of a Theolog- 
ical Seminary training 304 

Systematic, a part of a The- 
ological Seminary training, . . 304 
Theology, at present acquiring a 

wholesome realistic spirit, . . 445 
is insisting on analogy between 

natural and moral law 445 

Theology. Scholastic, a sign of 

what? 497 



"Things are only thoughts," a 

Berkeleian aphorism 61 

"Thinking thinks," Hegel's dic- 
tum, 61, 70 

Thomasius, on God as "the sim- 
ply one," 165 

on nominalism in Theology, .... 165 
on the divine attributes, 165, 189 
Thompson, Sir William, his the- 
ory of the introduction of 

life to this planet, 40 

Tuorwaldsen, his group, "Christ 

and His Apostles," 233 

"Thou art," inscription on Tem- 
ple at Delphi 4 

Thought, in philosophy of Nes- 
cience, what? 8, 13 

a true system of, recog- 
nizes the existence of meta- 
physical and moral truth,.. 20 
its monistic tendency towards 
Idealism or Materialism, .... 23 

not a mode of motion, 46 

Tieck on Dante, 523 

Time, an a priori truth, 48 

"Time, Death and Judgment," a 

painting by Watts, 525 

Titus, his treatment of Jerusa- 
lem 484 

To (xttAws ei', God is not, 165 

Toplady's hymn on Christ's sub- 
stitution 219 

Totus in omni parte, 51 

Tourmaline, the, illustration 

from its polarization of light, 446 
Tours, defeat of Saracens at, ... . 485 
Trade, rests on law of reciprocal 

benefit 450 

Trades-unions and similar com- 
binations, what objectionable 

in 454 

Trench, Archbishop, on "Provi- 
dential Miracles," 136 

Troubadours, their rise, 500 

Truth in solution, tends to crys- 
tallize 2 

Truth, often consists of two op- 
posite propositions, not in 

their via media, 6 

In Theology, contains the true 
but irreconcilable factors of 
divine sovereignty and hu- 
man freedom, 6 

in consciousness, involves in 
one dual'ty two different 
things, matter and spirit, . . 6 
sacrificed, if either of its fac- 
tors ignored 6-8 

absolute, denied by Positivism, 11 
a globe with two opposite poles, 23 

an organic whole 239 

cannot deny any part of, with 

impunity, 239 

Baptist tenets are part of, ... . 239 
special parts of, committed to 
special keepers 241 



634 



INDEX. 



Truth, two possible plans of its 

dissemination 241 

in spiritual things defined 547 

influence of clearer views of, 

516, 547 

and love, consistent and insep- 
arable, 547 

Tit it a and Love, 5 16-548 

Tyndall, his materialism 31 

on ''the passage from the phys- 
ics of the; brain to the facts 

of consciousness," 36 

a Huraist 59 

on scientific imagination, 28 

Tyrian Ladder, its ascent, 477 

Ulysses, bis fate according to 

Dante, 508 

Unbelief, a stream of many ed- 
dies 31 

Unconscious Assumptions op 

Communion Polemics,. 245-249 
Uniformitarian theory of geology, 

recently modified, 141 

Uniformity of Nature, see Na- 
ture. 
Union with Christ, The Be- 
liever's 220-225 

Union with Christ, believer's, has 
received little formal treat- 
ment, 220 

its neglect a reaction from ex- 
aggerations of mysticism, . . 220 
is taught variously and abund- 
antly in Scripture, 220 

illustrations of 220 

direct teachings of 221 

its scientific definition difficult, 221 

is a fact of life, 221 

a stage in the approximation of 

God to his creatures, 221 

not a mere natural cause 221 

not a mere moral union 221 

does not destroy distinct sub- 
sistence of either of the per- 
sons united, 221 

is not mediated by sacraments, 221 

as described in Scripture 222 

a union of soul with Christ, . . 222 
represented by union of build- 
ing and foundation 220 

of husband and wife, 220 

of vine and branches, 220 

of members with human body, 220 

of race with Adam, 220, 221 

differs from God's natural and 
providential concurrence with 

all spirits, 222 

differs from unions of mere 

association and sympathy, . . 222 
differs from mere moral un- 
ions 222 

Is a union of life 222 

preserves personality 222 

secures the energy of the Spir- 
it of Christ, 222 

is organic, 222 



Union with Christ, secures reci- 
procity in the parts of the 

organism, 222 

is a vital union 222 

is indissoluble, 222 

sacraments presuppose it, 222 

is inscrutable 222 

in what sense mystical, 222 

possessed by all believers, .... 222 
not consciously possessed by all 

believers, 222 

its knowledge sometimes ac- 
quired inadvertently 222 

knowledge of it as a personal 
privilege elevates Christian 

life 22.1 

is the focus of theology, 22:> 

explains our relation to Adam, 22.". 
throws light on the Atonement, 22:5 
secures believer's subjective 

reconciliation to God, 223 

makes justification more than 

a mere legal formality, 223 

Luther on 22.1 

frees the Imputation of Christ's 
righteousness from arbitrari- 
ness 224 

is the essence of religion, . . 224 
its relation to Regeneration, . . 224 

believer's, is cheering 224 

is purifying 224 

enables believer to appropriate 
prophecies and promises pri- 
marily referring to Christ, 224 
assists believer to reproduce 

Christ's life 224 

involves fellowship with the 

Savior, 224 

sanctifies the soul 224 

purifies and raises up the body, 224 
by it Christ gives his life to 

the church 224 

conveys assurance of salvation, 224 

communicates courage, 224 

removes indolence, 224 

checks alike impatience and 

faithless activity, 224 

assists in prayer 225 

sets forth the religion which 

can save humanity 225 

the central truth of all theol- 
ogy and religion, 302, 548 

the source of a minister's cour- 
age 557 

Unitarians, their view of the ab- 
solute simplicity of God, its 

results 183 

many advocate the eternity of 

matter, 1S3 

tend to Pantheism 183 

Unity, an unregulated passion for, 

deprecated 6 

in mental and material pheno- 
mena, how found 6S 

Univ&rsaUa in re, true though 

not independent realities,.. 161 



INDEX. 



635 



Universe, the, from the Positive 

position, 

denial of purpose in, 11 

can produce a Comte but can- 
not equal his intelligence, . . 
a godless, any superstition bet- 
ter than such a conception, 

"a thought of God," 

contains an idea 

an expression of mind 

of one substance, according to 

Spencer, 

seeming imperfections in its or- 
der, discussed 82, 

its broadest signification given 
to the word, 

Universities, mediaeval, revival 
of learning in 

University, the, ever hospitable 

to ideas 

a teacher of philosophy 

Unpicturable things, many, are 
true, 

Unregenerate, certain remnants 
of power lingering with, 118, 

vTTOfxovri, its meaning enlarged on, 

Usefulness, each Christian has his 
special department of 

Utile, Cicero on, 

Valedictory words to various 
classes graduating from 
Rochester Theological Sem- 
inary 546, 548, 551, 

554, 557, 559, 580, 562, 566, 
569, 572, 575, 577, 580, 

Value, lies in labor constituting 
a "service," 

Values, other than material in 
Political Economy, 

Vedder, Elihu, his illustrations 
of Omar Khayyam's Rubai- 
yatj 

Veitch, on Non-Egotistical Ideal- 
ism, 

on the intelligibility of exter- 
nality of object 

Venus de'Medici described 

Violence, its future punishment 
according to Dante 

Virgil, what he represents in Di- 
vine Comedy, 507, 

Virgin, house of, its translation 
from Jerusalem to Rome, 
482, 

Vita Nuova of Dante, 

Vitry, James of, his typical igno- 
rance of foreign lands 

Volition, conscious, is it neces- 
sary to sin ? 101, 

Voltaire, his explanation of the 

presence of fossils, 

on influence of Purgatory 

Wallace, on difference between 
human and animal intelli- 
gence, 



5 S3 
44 S 
449 

533 

67 

67 
413 

512 

508 



46 



War, the hope of the feudal de- 
pendant, 490 

not waged from mere desire of 

vengeance 491 

Watts, George Frederick, a very 

realistic painter, 525 

his collection of pictures at the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 525 
' We are born in faith,' Fichte's 

aphorism, 21 

Wealth, its trials 401 

Webster, Daniel, on "room high 

up," 282 

Weeping at the grave, Jewish cus- 
tom of 477 

Wellington, on "the finger of 

Providence." 29 

West Point, why quality of stu- 
dent at present deteriorating 

there, 292 

Whately, Richard, on a professor- 
ship of Political Economy in 
each theological school, .... 443 
Whedon, on God's making him- 
self happy in wrong, 106 

Whispering-gallery, illustration 

from 551 

' White Rose ' of highest heaven, 
the resting-place of those 
who at the same time are 
working in the subordinate 

heavens, 522 

Wiberg, Andreas, his usefulness 

in Sweden 243 

Will, personal, superior to na- 
ture's laws, 25 

only key to interpretation of na- 
ture 25, 26 

Will, the results of denying its 

freedom, 36, 37 

infinite, need not manifest its 

whole power, 43 

infinite, alone necessarily per- 
sists, 43 

Will, The, in Theology, 90-113 

Will, the difficulty of discussions 

concerning, 90 

facts regarding, 91 

what facts enter into the lib- 
erty of 91 

the liberty of, shown in mental 

energy specially, 91 

its freedom held by Calvin, . . 92 
requires some reason for its 

activity, 92 

requires motive, 93 

its liberty not dependent on in- 

determinateness, 93 

its motives within mind, .... 93 
its strongest motive, the rul- 
ing preference, 93 

its completer definition, 94 

its freedom consistent with 
fixed direction and form of 
its volitions 94 



636 



INDEX. 



Will, its freedom compatible with 

certainty of action 93 

as a faculty of volitions is 
causa causans, 95 

as related to character is causa 
causata, 95 

its formal freedom, 95 

the origin of its necessity of 
evil 95 

its civil freedom 95 

as treated in most moral phil- 
osophies, 95 

has no power to change charac- 
ter, 90 

cannot disregard motive, 90 

errors of philosophers regard- 
ing, 90 

a more comprehensive defini- 
tion of, 96, 97 

its place in the universe ac- 
cording to Schopenhauer and 
Hartmann 97 

unconscious 97 

further defined, 97 

Revue Chretienne on 97 

not a 'creative first cause,'.. 97 

author's theory of, required by 
a true doctrine of divine 
foreknowledge 98, 101 

author's theory of, required by 
a true doctrine of man's re- 
sponsibility for native de- 
pravity 101-103 

author's theory of, recapitu- 
lated and tested by Scrip- 
ture 9S-113 

caprice-theory of, 99-101 

author's theory of, necessary to 
a Scriptural sense of the uni- 
versality' of personal guilt, . . 102 

author's theory of, necessary 
to a just view of the extent 
of the divine law, 102 

how responsible for an inborn 
state of 103 

author's theory of. harmonizes 
with Scriptural teachings on 
the divine initiative in sal- 
vation, 103 

author's view of. agreeable 
with Scripture teaching on 
the permanence of character 
in God and the redeemed, 105-107 

author's view of, defined from 
objection 107-111 

its motives never equally bal- 
anced, 107 

may remain same while vast 
subordinate improvements 
take place in character, 111, 112 

Jonathan Edwards' theory of, 
insufficient 120 

always and everywhere acts 
only in view of motives 12? 

as related to motive, 122 



Will, its own determiner, 122 

considered as absolutely origi- 
nating, 12.T 

obedient yet elective, 123 

an undetermined cause, 123 

chooses direction only 123 

and desire, how related, , 123 

sinners have not lost all natu- 
ral power of 124 

its natural freedom under grace 
becomes a higher freedom... 120 

its ' formal ' and ' real ' free- 
dom 126 

use of its ' formal ' freedom 
may lead to ' real ' freedom, 120 

may use its formal freedom 
till habit is incurable, 126 

human, can act on nature and 
produce results which nature 
alone could not accomplish,. . 134 

human, not determined by nat- 
ural law, 135 

has a power superior to na- 
ture's laws, 135 

the central fact in personality, 
human and divine 1S2 

aD independent, granted by God 
to man 360 

strongest thing in being, save 

God 550 

Withered hand, a parable of sal- 
vation 113 

Woman, modern view of her dig- 
nity, 207 

Woman's Place and Work, 400-409 
Woman, her place and work ac- 
cording to Gen. 2: 18, .... 400 

her paradisaic state, 400 

how received by Adam 400 

in her nature equal with man, 400 

in office subordinate to man... 401 

one with man in life and work, 401 

her head is man, as Christ's 
head is God 401 

her position not determined by 
curse, 401 

divine curse upon, what does it 
mean? 402 

her degradation among Hindus 
and Jews 402 

any existing relics of injustice 
to her in laws or manners 
should be put away 402 

facilities of culture should be 
as free to her as to man, . . 403 

all suitable occupations should 
be open to 403 

her remuneration should be 
equal to that of man 403 

reform in all things injuriously 
affecting, has sympathy of 
Christian teacher 403 

any prominent, entitled to fair 
judgment 403 



INDEX. 



637 



Woman, by sex, subordinated in 

office to man 403 

her subordination to man not 

explained on force theory, . . 40-1 
fitted by constitution for sub- 
ordination 404 

the duties of maternity preclude 

at times outdoor labor 405 

her grandest work, 405 

the influence of Christianity 
and civilization upon her po- 
sition, 405, 400 

the aspirations of the Buddhist. 406 
false views of her position af- 
fect the marriage bond, .... 406 

and the franchise, 407, 408 

her debt to Christianity, .... 409 
how she may be man's helper, 400 
how much she owes to Christ, 

410, 414 

her position in the east 410 

at Athens and Rome, 410, 411 

in heathen lands 411, 412 

her degradation self -perpetuat- 
ing 412 

her nature consecrated by the 

maternity of Jesus, 413 

her status elevated by her share 
equally with man in the re- 
deeming work of Christ 413 

honored by being made the first 

herald of the gospel, 413 

Teutonic reverence for, received 
new impulse from Christian- 
ity 414 

the passive virtues, usually 
deemed feminine, specially 

recognized by Christ 414 

her work for women in heathen 
lands a modern feature in 

Christian activity 415 

Woman, The Education op a, 

418-430 

Woman's Rights agitation, its 

fundamental error 405 

reasons for solicitude concern- 
ing 407 

Women, heathen, their numbers 

and condition 412 

elevated by Christ, 413 

Christian, can to some extent 
repay their debt to Christ 
by seeking to extend the 
blessings they have received 

to their sisters, 415 

not accessible to men, in some 

eastern countries, 416 

heathen, their influence as 
wives and mothers, 416 



Women, Mohammedans anxious 

for the education of their, . . 416 
their future missionary move- 
ments forecast, 417 

the writings of, their charac- 
teristics, 420 

eminent public, are exceptions, 

not examples, 429 

Women's American Baptist 
Missionary Society, its spe- 
cial work, 416 

its strength in 1S83 41G 

an opportunity for women to 
take part directly in mission 

work 417 

Woolman, John, his sympathetic 
sufferings as a member of a 

sinful race, 217 

Word, the spoken, its explanation 
more than a reference to vi- 
brations of air which consti- 
tute sound, 33 

of God, its personality, 545 

the only weapon of the Chris- 
tian ministry, 545 

relation of reason to 572 

Wordsworth, his poetry con- 
trasted with that of Swin- 
burne 56 

his lines contrasting the fixity 
of the material universe with 

the errancy of spirit 60 

compared with Browning 582 

deficient in a sense of the lu- 
dicrous, 537 

sometimes long-winded and 

wearisome, 537 

Work and Power 552-554 

Wundt, and his new German psy- 
chology 69 

Xenophon's saying concerning 

Cyrus, 564 

Youmans, his theory that so- 
called chemical elements are 
but modifications of a com- 
mon ultimate substance 6 

on transformation of force into 

consciousness, 24 

Zeal for Christ, 583-5S6 

Zeal distinguished from fanati- 
cism 5S4 

Zenana work, what? 416 

its advantages 416 

whom to be done by, 416 

Zola, his literary work charac- 
terized 531 



MAY 13 1912 



